I’d taken a mosaics class, and had played around with various materials—ceramics, marble, smalti, filato—but nothing really grabbed me fully. Then one day, I wanted to create something new, but didn’t have any substrate (the base layer of a mosaic) to use at my house, and when I went outside to water the garden, I noticed a pile of extra flagstones that had been siting in a pile under a large tree for a few years after we put in a pathway. And I wondered what it would look like to use one of them as a substrate. The rest, as they say, is…well, you know.