Help Me Plan A Mosaic Kitchen

I have an idea for remodeling my kitchen cabinets and would welcome lots of input. My kitchen is a very small, 1940 tract house kitchen with the original wood cabinets. Looks like what you find in many Granny kitchens. I would like to cover all surfaces of the cabinets with stained glass mosaic. The kitchen is such a small size, that I have never been able to get very exciting about putting in new cabinets and the current ones are very solid and in good shape. Just boring. On one side of the kitchen there is just room for a 24" stove and a refigerator with cabinets up above. The other side is about 8' long with the sink in the middle and a dishwasher below on one side of the sink. There is a window above the sink and wall cabinets on either side of the window, so overall we are talking about maybe 50 square feet of wood to be covered with mosaic. Now the bad part of this is that I'm not an artist and have limited experience in doing mosaic, so could use some beginner hints. These links gives an idea of the type of design I have in mine:

http://www.lagniappemosaic.com/143brainfog.htm
http://www.lagniappemosaic.com/115BMainBathCabinets.htm

Here are some questions I have already come up with:

1. Do you think this is a crazy idea?

2. The cabinets are stained and varnished. Do I need to sand them or put some type of base coating on before appling the mosaic?

3. I am leaning towards using stained glass because I like the patterns. Do you think I should also use some regular small tiles or just stick with the glass?

4. I thinking of black counter tops and sticking with a mostly browns, amber, cremes, whites for the glass with black to pull things together. Here is a link to the glass I am looking at to begin with.

http://store.allstainedglass.com/ambertest.html

5. So you think it would look best to stick to these colors or add something like the multicolored streaky or blue purple amber streaky on this page?

http://store.allstainedglass.com/wiglst.html

Or maybe some clear textured glass like here?

http://store.allstainedglass.com/ptprodsercle.html

6. What color grout do you think would work best with these colors?

Now, I know all this depends on my personal taste, but I'm having a hard time picturing it all together and would like some ideas.

Thanks,
Susan








This message was edited Jul 17, 2006 3:50 AM