It's Always The Little Things

It seems like I am always being delayed by things I don't expect.  I should just expect something to go wrong at this point and assume every task will take double the time I think it will!

I ordered a bunch of mosaic tiles recently, and am in the process of detaching them from their paper backing.  This is done by soaking them in water until the glue holding them onto the paper dissolves, which takes only about 5 minutes.

One of the tile colors, however, absolutely refuses to detach from the paper.  I don't know what happened to this batch, and it has never happened to me before, but even after soaking them for two days, they are still stuck.  I eventually gave up my hopes for an easy solution and set to work.

A five minute job is now taking hours. I had to tear each tile off of the soaked paper, and now I am working my way through the 225 tiles, scraping the glue and paper remains off of the tile.  The paper remains are stuck fast to the side of the tile that will show in a finished mosaic, so I have to get it off.  Scrubbers don't get it well enough and besides, the tiny tiles are too small to hold with one hand and scrub with the other, so I scrape and scrape with the only tool that does the job adequately--my fingernails.

One step at a time!