Blue Tiles & Mosaics

The made blues

Glass is the largest material here, then porcelain and ceramic, and all three arrive at blue the same way, by putting it into the material during manufacture.

That is why the made blues cover the whole range from a pale sky to cobalt and sapphire, and why they are consistent from piece to piece. Glass in particular does blue better than anything else, since light passes through the body rather than bouncing off a surface. Glass mosaic covers the sheets.

Bluestone is the quarried half

Sandstone is the largest natural material in this range, and almost all of it is bluestone: a fine-grained stone quarried in the northeastern United States that has paved terraces and sidewalks there for a century and a half.

Its blue is a cool gray with a blue cast rather than a blue anybody would call blue in a paint chart, and it is sold in two grades, full color and blue select, depending on how much of the rest of the quarry's range is included. Porcelain pavers carries the printed version of the same stone.

Why so much of this range is outdoor

Pavers, pool copings and 20 mm pieces make up a large part of this page, which is not true of most color pages.

Both halves of the color end up outdoors for different reasons. Bluestone is a paving stone by trade. Glass and glazed blue go around pools because blue is what water is expected to look like, and because glass takes up no water at all. The edge itself belongs to pool and spa paving.

Flamed, sandblasted and split face

Glossy leads the finishes, as it does on any glass-heavy range, but behind it sit flamed, sandblasted, split face and natural faces that belong entirely to the stone half.

Flaming passes an intense flame across a stone so the surface minerals spall away and leave a rough open texture. Sandblasting does something similar with abrasive. Both are exterior treatments, and finding them on a color page at all is a sign of how much of this range is paving.

Shade variation, and which half it belongs to

The variation figures on this page cluster at medium and high, which is higher than a color page usually runs.

That reading comes almost entirely from the stone. A bluestone is a sedimentary rock with banding and iron staining through it, so full color material varies piece to piece by design. The made blues sit at the other end: a glaze or a glass batch repeats, which is the whole advantage of a manufactured color.

Crackle, and the blues that move

Crackle turns up here in a small group, and on blue it does something worth knowing about.

A crackle is a network of fine cracks in the glaze layer, and each crack catches the blue underneath at a slightly different depth. On a pale blue that produces a surface with several tones in it at once, which is the closest a flat wall tile gets to the depth a glass mosaic has.

The formats split the same way

12x12 leads by a long way, which is the glass mosaic sheet, followed by 3x12, 12x24, 24x48, 3x6 and 6x6, with 0.5x12 pencil liners and a set of paving sizes.

Those two groups never meet. A 12x12 glass sheet and a 24x48 paver are in the same collection because of a color field and nothing else, and a project will be interested in one or the other. The thickness list says the same thing twice over: a quarter inch at one end of the page and two inches at the other, with almost nothing in between, because thin glass and structural paving are the two things blue is made into and there is very little else.

Where blue goes

A pool, a spa, a bathroom, a kitchen backsplash, a shower wall and a terrace. Blue carries an association with water that no other color has to argue for, which is why it concentrates in wet rooms and almost never appears on a living room floor.

Blue marble tile is the small stone exception, and blue backsplash tile for a kitchen the kitchen cut of the color.