Tadelakt Attack تادآلاكت
I finished parts of my shower using a moroccan lime plaster technique called tadelakt تادآلاكت which involves introducing olive oil soap into the final layer and burnishing it with a polished stone to create a really smooth finish that you just want to keep touching. i learned the basics last year from the excellent Ryan Chivers of Artesano Plasters in Colorado, and finally got around to doing my first piece here. We had problems with the lime base coat as the shower had been in use and possibly already become waterproofed through soap suds, and thus we had a very slow dry time and vastly differing set-up time from top to bottom of the walls. as it took a lot longer than i thought it couldn't be completed over a weekend so the timing was a bit off and hard to give the burnishing as much loving as it deserved but it still managed to be a fairly decent first effort. i chose to have a white plaster as i already have a few colours in the bathroom and didn't want to add more but in hindsight i think i would have tried to match the pale green in the concrete floor. i used dolomite sand for the mixture, it's local and is already graded, washed and bagged so it sounds ideal, but again, in hindsight, having a darker sand would have allowed small grains to show through the surface and added more visual texture to the finish. great learning experience.