Cut the tile, spread some mortar, back-butter the tiles,

First piece up… First piece down. Apparently the tile backer came unglued when the tiles got wet from the tile saw… and this is the messy result:

So we put all those pieces up individually, then desperately tried to make the rows and columns straight. This made a huge mess:

Following the disaster, the sheets that had gotten wet were treated to a hot air blast from my hairdryer:

This was a random try but thankfully prevented any more tile backing mishaps!