Glass Mosaic Tiles

Face mounted and back mounted sheets

A glass mosaic arrives one of two ways. Back mounted puts a mesh or a dot of adhesive behind each chip, which is fast and is what most opaque mosaics use. Face mounted puts a sheet of paper on the front instead, holding the chips from the side that will be seen, and that paper comes away once the sheet is in place.

The second method exists mainly for glass. With nothing behind the chips at all, what ends up visible through them is whatever they were set into, and that keeps the color of the glass clean. The mounting method is on the individual product page, and on a transparent range it is worth reading.

The sheets are 12x12

Most of this range is a 12x12 sheet covering a square foot, with 11x11, 11 3/4x11 1/2, 11x13, 12x18 and a set of odd dimensions behind it, and boxes that run to twenty square feet.

The odd sizes come from the same place they do on any mosaic: the chip pattern decides the sheet rather than the other way round. What makes glass different is that the joints between sheets are easier to see, since a translucent chip shows any change in what sits behind it.

Blue leads a glass range and nothing else

Blue is the largest color group here, ahead of gray and white, which is true of no other material in the catalog. On a stone page blue is the rarest color there is.

Glass gets there because of how the color works. In an opaque tile blue is a pigment on or in a surface that reflects it back; in glass the blue is in the body and light travels through it, which is what gives glass a depth of blue no fired or quarried material reaches.

Blends within a single sheet

A large part of this range is blended: five or six tones of one color distributed across the chips of a single sheet rather than one flat color repeated.

That is a thing a sheet can do and a field tile cannot. At chip scale a blend reads as one color with movement in it from a few feet away and as a set of distinct tones up close, which is why a blended glass backsplash changes as you walk toward it.

Glossy, and the frosted exception

Glossy carries this range almost entirely, with smaller matte, polished and mixed gloss and matte groups.

Glass is glossy by default, since a smooth glass surface is what comes out of the process. A matte glass chip has been acid etched or sandblasted afterwards to scatter the light, so the matte pieces here are the worked ones and the glossy ones are the material left alone.

Thickness, and where the sheet meets something else

The chips here run thin: many sit around a quarter of an inch or less, against the 3/8 inch that a stone mosaic and most field tile use.

That difference shows at every place a glass sheet meets another material. Where glass runs as a band inside a stone or ceramic field, the two sit at different heights unless the difference is taken up underneath, and that is the single most common thing to get wrong with a glass accent.

Why a glass sheet shows its joins

Two sheets of the same glass mosaic set next to each other can show the line between them more readily than two sheets of stone or porcelain would.

The reason is transparency again. On an opaque mosaic the eye compares the faces of the chips; on a translucent one it also sees whatever the chips are sitting on, and any change there registers through the glass. It is why the joint between sheets is planned to fall in the same rhythm as the joints inside them, so the grid stays even across the whole wall.

Where glass mosaic goes

A kitchen backsplash, a shower wall, a bath surround, a pool or spa, and a band inside another material. The pool is the oldest use and the one the material was made for: glass takes no water in at all and its color is unaffected by anything in the water.

Most of this range is wall product, and whether a given sheet is published for a floor sits on its own product page. Glass tile takes the material into larger formats, and mosaic tile carries the full range of sheets.