The Spread

Finished

I'm very pleased with the way it turned out. Good times are had by all!

In Progress Shots

The cutting phase was the most painstaking and grueling task of the project. More than 25 hours was spent turning whole corks into the 1800 hexagonal tiles. I ended up cutting more than 2000, however, I had to downsize the board to fit my backer material, turning more than 300 pieces in wasted effort.


Dying each piece to match my color scale was a painstaking task. Because each piece needed 10 -15 seconds to dye, more than 5 hours was spent simply coloring the cork tiles. The dye used was a combination of dehydrated black currant juice and boiled down coffee.


Ah, wood glue, the backbone of any good project...


I really did like the look of the cork board in this phase. Perhaps it was a waste of time to put all the pieces together only to rip them back off, but I felt like I needed to see the whole thing assembled. Plugging the pieces in without paying attention to orientation or value range was significantly faster than piecing together the final board. More than 23 hours was needed to adhere the final cork tiles to the backer board.

How to Spend a Week

Nothing much to say, except for, "BLAAAAH!"

To make an omlette, you have to... cut some cork?

I'm through cutting cork. Altogether, I have over 2050 individual pieces. That is enough to make a square board 45 tiles by 45 tiles. This works out to being about 27" square, which ends up being a bit smaller than I originally estimated, but adding more tiles is not really an option at this point.

Just some fun facts:

Each tile takes an average of 8-9 cuts to complete it's finished shape, which puts the total number of individual cuts over 17,000.

The total weight of all tiles is nearly 2 lbs. While the weight of the scrap is just over 3 lbs.

Each cork makes an average of 5-6 tiles, meaning roughly 350-375 corks were used in the production of the tiles. At one bottle per night, it would take you a full year to amass this number of corks from regular consumption.

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:

If You Thought I was Crazy...

I can't believe that I didn't stumble across this yet, but here it is:
http://www.charisecreates.blogspot.com/

This lady is embarking on a very similar task to the one I'm on. The difference is she's doing everything by hand. No molds, cookie cutters, or masks... This is the real deal. I can't imagine the number if hours needed to stitch them all together... Wow.