How a mosaic tray is made

People pick up a tray at the stall and ask the same lovely question: how long did this take? The honest answer is a few days and about a hundred and fifty small decisions. Here is the journey.

1. Drawn on a grid

Every pattern starts as a digital tile grid, nudged one square at a time until the geometry sits right. It is slow, meditative work and it is where a piece succeeds or fails: a tumbling blocks cube that is one tile off never stops looking one tile off.

2. Choosing the ceramics

The palette is seventeen matte ceramic colours, plus guest appearances from iridescent glass, mirror and rescued vintage crockery. Matte matters: the soft surface lets the geometry do the talking.

3. Nipping and laying

Tesserae are cut with hand nippers, then laid one by one onto the pattern. A drinks tray carries a few hundred tiles; each one gets checked against its neighbours before the glue goes anywhere near it.

4. The grout

Always dark. The grout is not the gap between the design, it is the design: the drawn line that turns loose tiles into one graphic object. There is a whole post about that.

5. Frame, seal, post

The finished mosaic sits in a wooden tray frame, gets sealed, and is wiped down until it squeaks. Then it is wrapped (customers keep mentioning the pleated paper) and posted anywhere in the UK, usually within a few days. See what is on the bench right now in the shop.