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Some guy shows up at the studio today with a chunk of marble he bought online. Says he's been "sculpting" for six months. Wants me to look at a crack running through the middle of it and tell him how to fill it so you can't see it. I told him you can't hide a crack in stone. You work with it or you start over. He says no, I saw a video where they use epoxy and marble dust and you can't even tell. I asked him what he's making. He says he hasn't decided yet, he just liked the stone. Six months. Doesn't know what he's making. But he's worried about covering a crack with epoxy. I told him to use the epoxy. What do I care. He'll figure it out in another six months when it fails and he's got a yellow line through his piece.

Bought a block of Carrara from a supplier I've used for years. Looked clean on the pallet. Got it on the bench, started roughing out, and about three hours in a hairline opens up right where I'm working. Not a surface crack. It was inside the damn stone. Now I've got a piece that's either going to be smaller than I planned or I scrap it entirely. Supplier says not their problem, stone is a natural material, inspect before you work. Which is true. But also infuriating. Twenty years ago I would have kept hammering and ruined it. Now I stop and stare at it for ten minutes and then go weld something instead. Progress I guess.

The commission was real. 3 metres, smalti and salvaged marble, over the reception desk of a small boutique hotel here in Kalamaria. Two months of work minimum, probably closer to three, plus materials. 2.400 euros. I said no, and then I spent a week wondering if I was being proud for no good reason. Because that money would have paid the rent for a while, and I am not in a position where 2.400 is nothing. Nobody in my business is. What killed it was the invoice. They wanted it all declared, clean, taxes paid, which is fair, that is their position. But then you take out EFKA and the tax and what is left is closer to 1.300, and the smalti alone for that size is over 600. So I would have been setting small stones by hand for three months at about the rate of a person who stands at a till. The till at least ends at 3. The galling part is that nobody there would look at a marble floor and ask for a discount. They know what stone costs. But the hours? The hours are invisible, so they get negotiated. I am not asking if I was right. I know I was right. I am asking what the rest of you do when the number is insulting but the money is real. Because I don't have a good answer for that yet.

I spent the morning sorting a box of offcuts I've been keeping since last spring. Anything smaller than a stamp goes into it. Hand-marbled endpapers from a 1901 hymnal I took apart, mostly. Some scraps I have not touched in eleven months and will not touch. I know this. Still could not do it. The box went back on the shelf, slightly tidier, which is not the same as emptied. The whole point of collage is that you take things apart, so the hoarding makes no sense on paper. Then again the scraps are the work. Every piece I have finished came out of a box like that one. I'm not asking for advice. I think I just wanted to write down that I failed at a very small task, in a room by myself, and it took the whole morning.

Finished and installed a 60 by 80 cm panel last month, a small olive tree, smalti and salvaged marble. I quoted 2,400 euros for it. That is materials, six weeks of setting, and the cement board, and I did the install myself with a hired van. The client paid without a word. Then, at the end, standing in the doorway with her coat on, she asked if she could have the leftover smalti. The offcuts. The bag of bits. I said yes because it is a bag of bits to anyone who does not cut stone. But those bits are 90 euros of material I already bought, and some of them are colours I will use again in March. I stood there holding a plastic bag of my own stock and feeling stupid about it. I have been thinking since about what I actually sold her. She thinks she bought the object. I think I sold six weeks and a bag of material and the bag got left on my floor. Nobody is wrong here, that is the annoying part. I am not going to start invoicing for offcuts. But I am going to start keeping them in a closed box before the client arrives, because apparently I need to organise my own generosity.

Six weeks ago I started posting the failures. Not the poetic ones, the actual duds: a smalti panel where I got the andamento wrong on a face and the nose reads like a shelf, a batch of tile I cut too thin that shattered the moment I pressed it in. Numbers, since this channel likes numbers. Reach went up maybe 40%. Comments dropped by half. And the DMs changed completely. Before, I got "how much for this" from people who never once converted. Now I get "I have my grandmother's broken marble table, could it become something" and three of those turned into paid commissions in six weeks. One from a woman in Kalamaria whose table is now a hallway panel and she cried when she picked it up. The "how much" crowd was never going to buy. They liked the finished photo, that is all. The people who write to you about the wreckage are the ones who understand you actually make the thing with your hands and want a piece of that. Also, small confession, I sleep better. Nobody claps for a shattered tile. Feels closer to the work.

There is a box on the shelf at the studio, and it is not a working box. Inside are maybe twenty sheets I have decided are too good for anything. A 1940s Swedish school atlas with the maps printed in three faded inks. A letter from 1911 with a handwriting I will never find again. Some marbled endpaper from a book I took apart at work and could not throw away. They have been in there four years. Every so often I take one out, hold it up, decide the piece I am working on is not worthy of it, and put it back. The piece stays unfinished, the paper stays in the box. I know exactly what this is. The moment I cut into the atlas it stops being the atlas and becomes material, and material is something you can ruin. But a box of uncut paper has no failure in it. Anyway. Today I cut a strip off the corner of one of the maps, the plain ocean blue part, and glued it down. It was fine. The strip looked good, actually. The rest of the sheet is still the atlas. I am telling myself this is a reasonable compromise, but I suspect it is just a slower version of the same hoarding. Curious how many people here have a shelf of the good stuff they never touch.

Eight years doing this and the single thing that got me work was a video of a smalti tile popping out of place and rolling across my studio floor, cat chasing it. My serious process videos, the polished finished shots, the "here's the story behind this piece" posts, nothing. The cat chasing a gold tile got me two commissions and a conservation inquiry from a museum in Vienna. I've stopped trying to figure out the algorithm. It's not a craft, there's no skill to learn, it's just weather. Some days the light hits your post, most days it doesn't. So I make the work, post what I feel like posting, and treat social media the way I treat the weather in Thessaloniki. I don't argue with it, I just dress for it. The people who do well on here spend their whole day on here. I don't have that in me and neither does my back. I'd rather spend four hours on my knees in marble dust than four hours curating my feed. Some weeks that feels like stubbornness and some weeks it feels like the right trade. Mostly it's a wash. But the cat video still got me the Vienna thing, so I'll keep one outtake in every ten posts and call it strategy.

For years I did the dance. "DM for pricing." Which means a week of polite emails with someone who was never going to buy anything, while I pretend the number is a secret worth protecting. Nonsense. The number is the number. So in March I started putting it in the caption. This panel, 40x60, smalti and salvaged marble, 1.900 euro, four to six weeks. That simple. No "investment" language, no "collections start at." Two people unfollowed. Fine, they were never my people. What I did not expect: three inquiries in the first month, and one of them bought. A woman in Kalamaria who said she had been following me for a year and always assumed my work was "for museums or hotels." She thought the mystery meant expensive. It was the vagueness that scared her off, not the price. The other thing nobody warns you about, the asking is the exhausting part. I have spent years answering "how much for something like this" with nothing to look at, and the whole time we both knew I was guessing at a wall. I am not going to pretend it fixed everything. Some people see the number and go quiet, and that is information too, it saves us both a month. And yes there is a small guilt, like saying money out loud in a room where nobody else has. Greek thing maybe. Anyway. If you have been hiding your prices to seem more serious, I would look at that. The hiding is usually doing the opposite of what you think.

Had a student this week, third year with me, technically very good. Clean edges, correct values, the drawing underneath all correct. And the paintings are dead. Nothing wrong with them. That is the problem. So I made her do an exercise: take a canvas already dry, a study she liked, and scumble dirt over it. Grey, ochre, a scraped-down mess. Then find the painting again in the wreck. She looked at me like I had insulted her mother. Honestly I might have. But by the end of the session she had a shoulder and a bit of wall that were more alive than anything she has painted in a year, because she could not control it anymore, so she had to look. I did the same thing to myself at her age and I hated it. What I think now: technique is what lets you get away with the accident, not what prevents it. You cannot smear your way out of not being able to draw, the drawing has to be there underneath or it is just a mess with a mood, but the drawing alone is a recipe for marble. Anyway she is furious with me and she will come back Thursday. Both things are correct.

My daughter set up my Instagram because she got tired of hearing me complain that nobody knew my work. That was two years ago. I have 4,000 followers now and I still don't fully get it. Here's what I've learned. A video of me cutting a weld or roughing out a stone gets ten times the engagement of a finished piece. Every time. The half-finished is interesting, the finished is just another picture. People don't want the result, they want to watch it happen. I used to fight it because it felt like giving away the process. Now I figure there's no real harm. Nobody is going to copy the work from a thirty second clip. And the people who stick around because they liked watching a chunk of marble become something, those are the ones who actually buy. Still feels like a dog doing tricks. But it works better than what I was doing, which was nothing.

Nine years ago I made a floor panel for a couple in Kalamaria, about 1.2 square metres, smalti and marble, a vine pattern they wanted because of her grandfather's garden. Last month they sold the flat and the new owner didn't want it, so they brought it back. Not angry at anyone, they just didn't know what else to do with it and I was the only person they knew who handled this. So it's leaning against my studio wall now. And the strange thing is, I have the leftover smalti still in a jar, same batch, and I've started cutting into the two sections I always hated. There's a leaf on the right edge that's too heavy and I knew it at the time and sent it anyway because I was behind and they were paying by the week. I'm not repairing it. Nobody asked me to. I just want to see if I can make that leaf sit down properly. Nine years of setting stone and my hand knows things now it didn't then. Funny what comes back to you when you're not expecting it.

I keep every offcut. Every sliver of smalti too small to set, every chip of marble from a restoration job in 2011, all of it goes in old jam jars on the shelf and everyone tells me it's a sickness. Fair. The shelf is a mess and I can't get to the good tweezers. Today I was setting a small panel, sky over the Thermaic, and I ran out of the blue I'd been hoarding. I sat there annoyed with myself for a while and then I just started pulling the jars down. There's so much blue in there. Twelve years of blues, all slightly different, some matte, some glassy, bits from a fountain mosaic in the old town, bits from a commission I lost money on. I laid them in and the whole thing went alive in a way my tin of new blue never does. The old pieces are duller. The dullness is what makes it look like weather. Anyway. Fifteen years of not throwing things out, and today it paid. I finished the sky before the light went. I'm not saying it's a great sky, I'm saying it's the first one I've made that looks like it's actually over water. If you keep a jar of rubbish, tell me what's in it, I want to feel less alone on this.

A woman wants a 4 metre mosaic for a hotel lobby in Halkidiki. Deposit was good money, more than I made in the whole of 2013. She has a Pinterest board. She sent it twice. I went to see the space on Monday. Grey marble everywhere, that cold beige lighting, and she wants a "warm, organic, hand-made feeling" in smalti. Smalti in a lobby with no daylight is money thrown into a hole. By year two it reads flat and dead and my name is on it. So I said no. Politely, with an actual reason, and offered her a smaller stone piece for the reception wall instead. Half the money. She hasn't replied. I sat on the balcony after the call with a coffee going cold feeling like an idiot, and then around an hour later something in my chest just let go. Fifteen years I've been taking things I knew were wrong because the month needed paying. I'm not doing it anymore. I'd rather grout a bathroom floor. Also my left thumbnail is black again from a bad hammer strike. Unrelated. Or maybe not.

Kept it in the bottom of my toolbox like I was going to fix it. You don't fix a chisel that splits at the tang. I knew that. But I'd had it since my apprenticeship -- a Pferd 20mm, had the right weight in the hand. Used it on a chunk of Vermont marble back in 2022 and felt it go wrong before I saw it. Put it in the drawer anyway. Tossed it this morning. Felt stupid about it. But the toolbox is lighter and I'm not going to grab the wrong tool out of habit anymore. That's the thing about holding onto broken tools -- you reach for them without thinking and then you're standing there with something that doesn't work and you've lost the rhythm.

Not going to pretend I have any idea what I'm doing on here. My daughter set this account up and I'm trying. But here's what actually worked for me this year. There's a stone yard about 40 minutes from the studio. Big operation, commercial stuff, countertops and monuments. They've got a pile out back of broken slabs, cutoffs, chunks with veins running the wrong way. Stuff they'd pay to haul off. I went in person three times over two months. Brought coffee once. Just asked if I could pick through it. They finally said fine, just sign the waiver. I've pulled maybe 800 pounds of good marble and granite out of there so far. Paid nothing. And the crazy part is, a local contractor saw me loading pieces into my truck one day and asked what I was doing. That turned into a commission. Then the yard guys tell their customers about me sometimes when someone wants something custom. Cost me about 12 bucks in gas and some patience. Way better return than the Instagram ads my daughter set up for me. Those got me nothing but spam accounts telling me my work is "mesmerizing." Anyway. If you work with physical materials, find the local supplier's scrap pile. Bring coffee. Ask nice. That's the whole strategy.

There is a drawer in the studio with maybe forty sheets in it that I have owned for over a decade and will never cut. Old endpapers from a bookbinding job, a few sheets of Swedish marbled paper from the fifties, one piece of Japanese tissue so thin it behaves like a rumour. I take them out maybe twice a year, look at them, put them back. It is not sentiment exactly. They are simply too good to spend on an arrangement that is not good enough for them, and no arrangement ever is. So they sit there being perfect and useless. Meanwhile the things I actually finish are made of the torn-up envelope backs and the water-damaged hymnal nobody wanted. Which is fine. That is the work. But I have started to wonder whether the drawer is a stash or an excuse. Keeping the good stuff intact means I never have to find out that my best paper would not save a bad composition. Anyone else hoarding something they know perfectly well they will die owning? Or is this just me being a coward with a nice drawer.

It has taken me four sheets and most of a week to get the silver marbling on a single Cyclamen hederifolium leaf correct, and I finished it this morning. The difficulty is not the pattern. Anyone can trace a pattern. The difficulty is that the silver is not a color laid on top of the green. It sits in the leaf and shifts with the light, and if you paint it as a flat grey wash you get something that looks like a print of the leaf rather than the leaf. I tried masking fluid on the second attempt and it left a hard, dead edge I could see from across the room. Third attempt I overworked it and the paper went to wool. This one is four thin washes of a very weak viridian and French ultramarine, with the silver left as bare paper and only the faintest cool shadow dropped in at the margins of the marking. I did nothing to it for two days in between and that was the trick, as it usually is. It is one leaf on a half sheet. My husband asked what I had been doing all week and I showed him and he said, "that's one leaf." He is not wrong, and he is also not a botanical painter. I have five more to do for the plate. Some weeks this work is entirely humbling and I would not trade it.

It's so cold in the shop right now the marble feels different under the chisel. Stiff. Holds the cut too long and then lets go all at once. I've worked stone in this kind of cold plenty of times, you just go slower or you bust it. But my hands are 61. They don't warm up like they used to. Twenty minutes in and the fingers are telling me things I don't want to hear. Dragged a propane heater out this morning and it's doing just about nothing against a concrete floor and a tin roof. I keep my good chisels in the house this week like they're houseplants. Nobody warns you that the cold part of the work gets harder than the heavy part. I can still move a two hundred pound block around, but I can't keep my own hands above fifty degrees. That's the trade, I guess. The strength stays longer than the circulation.

My mother's mantel clock has lived in the studio for six years now. Nice piece, brass and marble, keeps perfect time. And I cannot work with it audible. The ticking pulls me out of the glaze layer and into counting. I finally took the pendulum off and stuffed a rag in the back just so I could have the thing on the shelf without losing my head. It's beautiful and it's useless to me as a timekeeper in here, which feels like some kind of metaphor I don't need to chase. The hours in this room are not measured the same way. You know when the light changes, when your knees complain, when the paint stops behaving. That's the clock that matters. The other one just makes you anxious.