Slow Grind

Ok, week 4 is in the past, week 5 starts today. I've completed nearly 1/6 of all needed cork pieces, and I've actually gotten better at cutting them. Later this week, I'll be bringing in some outside help, but I really think I'm sitting in a good spot. But I do know what I'm doing every single night this week...

Now, all this meditative work has got me thinking about the "unusable" portion of my project. Currently I'm only using 1/3 of all available material. The other 2/3 ends up as waste, which got me thinking, "Why are kiwis so delicious?" Actually, I was thinking about trying to turn the "waste" into some viable product as well. This would require grinding/cutting the rest of the cork into small bits, then mixing them with some kind of adhesive (this is the part that I'm really hung up on), spreading/flattening the mass and using for another, hypothetical portion of the project.

If anyone has a good lead on a non-toxic, flexible adhesive, please let me know. I'll be searching The Google.

Lastly, I've overcome my uncertainty about generating the "map" for my hex-pixels. You would be surprised at the difficulty in finding a filter or algorithm which can calculate average pixel color based on any given selection, let alone find something which does this specifically for hexagons. But I found a filter for Painter which does just that. These are some examples: