This tile mural is 20 inches high by 29 inches wide. The leaf-shape tiles had been salvaged from a boomerang shaped coffeetable (wood top covered with tile by my mother) which was later given to a neighbor who cut off the ends to make it fit her living room.
Years later I found the coffeecan containing the salvaged leaf tiles (and the leftover unused ones), and put them with my 'cute stuff' collection. Years after that I bought several sheets of 1/4" tile with randomly placed colors on the mesh and a single sheet of slightly larger mottled brown tiles. Years after that, I cut the tiles apart from the mesh because we needed a thin strip of tile to go around the edge of the raised shower area in the 'blue room' addition we'd put on the house.
Once I started cutting them apart, I amused myself sorting them into colors. Then I remembered the 'leaves' and spent a couple of days playing with arrangements. I intended to dismantle the final design, but mom thought after all that fuss I might as well keep it. Dad nailed a temporary frame to the wall at the end of the hallway near what's now my computer/ sewing/ library/ crafts room and figured out how we could use Contact paper to pick up the design in one piece and set it into the tile-set stuff he put on the wall.
So there's the story of the abstract garden that grew on its own.
