Summer Project: Octopus floor

I’ve been working on a home project this spring / summer — replacing the tile in our front hall. The original tile was a dark brown ceramic that really soaked up the light and looked pretty vile in my opinion — plus they were stuck down with some kind of brown glue/grout that was crumbling and another couple tiles would pop out and have to be glued back in every couple of weeks…
The above design was inspired by some Roman floors in the ruins of Herculaneum… and is only about 1/2 of the way done. Most of the tile was salvaged — the yellow tile is a thick Italian clay tile and the off-white tile is a thick white/natural marble. Most of the off white marble tiles were just fragments, so I smashed them up into irregular bits with a hammer and then fit them together like a jig saw puzzle. The blue and brown squares are a cheap glass mosaic tile I bought at Home Depot — 9.99 a square foot. It’s only been mortared — I’m going to grout it when I finish the whole thing.
The octopus is going to be filled in with various shades of blue ceramic tile (I think — I am still working on the color scheme). The brown you see in the picture is actually a thin layer of masonite I had to affix to the floor. Cutting the ‘octopus’ shape out of masonite and fastening it down was the hardest part of the project so far. The rest was just work intensive — finding little irregular bits that would fit together and then cementing them into place. Because the tile I will be using for the octopus is half as thick as the marble and the yellow ceramic tile, I had to underlay the design in masonite so that the whole would be level when I am done.
Hopefully later this summer I’ll post a pic of the finished product.