Cut 40 years off an old ceramic tile by hand and it finally gave me the red I needed
I've been hunting this exact red for months. Not the orange-red or the brick one, the deep blood red with just enough brown in it. Nothing in the smalti catalog was right and I was getting tired of mixing and matching.
Then I remembered my yiayia's old kitchen. When they tore down the house in 2019 I kept a box of the tiles because I couldn't not. Took me three days of working up the nerve to cut one, because once you cut it it's gone, you know? No going back.
Night before last I finally clamped one down, scored it, snapped it. The crack ran clean and there it was. Exact red, forty years old, still perfect. Half a box of them. I nearly cried over a floor tile in my own apartment.
The piece I've been blocked on for a month is moving again. Sometimes the material is out there waiting and it just happens to be your grandmother's floor.
Keep the thing. Even if it feels like clutter. You don't know what it's for yet.
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The three days of sitting with it before cutting is the part I recognise most. You know once it's scored there's no un-snapping it, and that's the whole point, isn't it. The risk is what makes the red worth having.
But forty years in a kitchen wall, and the colour held. There's something in that. A glaze doesn't care about nostalgia, it just sits there doing its job until someone finally bothers to look at it properly.
Congrats. Use it well and don't hoard the rest of the box. That's a trap I know too. If it's still in the box, it's still just a tile, not the red.
The box is the hardest material in any studio. Nobody talks about that.
I've got a shelf of things I saved because I couldn't not, and half of them are still doing nothing but sitting there being saved. The ones I finally used, every single time I've thought, why did I wait so long. And the ones I'm still holding, I know exactly what they are: fear with good taste.
You're right that the glaze doesn't care. It's been that red since the kiln, it'll be that red after all of us. The only thing the waiting changes is you.
"fear with good taste" is going to live with me now, that's exactly what it is. And you're dead right about the glaze, that red sat in the kiln waiting while I sat on my hands for months. The tile wasn't the one that was scared. I was. It's funny, I teach this and I still have to talk myself into it every single time. You'd think after forty years of handling the stuff I'd have learned by now. I haven't. I just got faster at the talking myself into it part. 🙂
You got it exactly right, especially the last part. That box sat there for five years being a box of tiles. The red only existed the second I committed to losing one. Hoarding it was just keeping a memory, not making anything.
And yeah, forty years and the glaze didn't flinch. Makes you think about how much of what we make is meant to outlast the reasons we made it. A kitchen wall in 1979 didn't know it was answering a question someone would ask in 2025.
The rest of the box is staying put for now though. I've got enough nerve used up this week. It'll be there when the next color won't come from anywhere else. 🙂