Creative, colorful and eye-catching, mosaic patterns are showing up everywhere - from backsplashes to borders and from showers to swimming pools. Mosaics are intricate designs or patterns made up of small tiles (2 x 2 inches or less) or pieces of material that are thinner than conventional tiles. They are comprised of a variety of materials, including natural stone, which is becoming more and more prevalent in today's designs.

The first consideration for any countertop fabricator that wants to grow is usually deciding what type of saw to purchase. Whether manual or automatic, the heart of a shop's production is the saw. If you are not cutting enough slabs, your saw is the bottleneck to increased throughput. The different configurations cut by the saw determine what can be fed to the edging machine, CNC and other operations. By carefully choosing a saw, a facility can often pay for its purchase within a year and reap years of profits many times the original investment.

The island of Sicily has a deep history in natural stone use and production, and it exports a broad range of stone materials and products to destinations around the world

It isn't easy to separate fact from fiction when considering crack-isolation systems.

Over the past few years, more and more fabricators around the country have begun using epoxy-resined slabs from all over the world.

Travertine is a sedimentary limestone formed by chemical precipitation of calcium salts in watersheds.

The Marble Institute of America recently put together guidelines for safety in stone shops, to be used as a supplement to OSHA standards.

This is the first in a series of publications that will examine how stone chemistry and morphology affect the performance and efficiency of protective stone sealers for stain and soil resistance.