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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.

A man in Ano Poli is closing his workshop after 40 years, selling everything. I went for one box of smalti and came home with six kilos. Some of it he cut himself in the 90s, colours they stopped making. There is a blue in there I cannot describe, it is not in any catalogue. So now the problem. I have a face I have been working on for three weeks, and this blue does not belong in it. But I cannot stop thinking about where it goes. Six kilos is not a small amount. It is sitting in a crate next to my work table like a guest I have to feed. Also I paid more than I should have. The economic situation here taught me to be careful and I am usually careful. But the man was selling his whole life. What do you say to that. Anyway. Anyone else buy material for a piece that does not exist yet? I think I bought the next three years, not six kilos.

I ordered a red smalti I did not want. The sample card looked like a deep oxblood, and what arrived is this loud tomato colour, the kind you see on old taverna chairs. I was annoyed for about a day, then I started laying it into the edge of a piece I've been working on since January. It has completely woken the thing up. Everything around it looks better, more serious, because of this stupid cheerful red I did not ask for. My old teacher in conservation used to say the material has its own opinion. I used to think that was just something people say to sound wise. Apparently not. Now I have to decide how much of it to use, and I am nervous about a colour I did not even order last month. Two kilos of it sitting in a tub in the corner looking at me. Anyway. If you find a mistake you like, you keep it. That's the whole thought.

Ordered a brick of Venetian smalti, the deep inky blue I always use for sky. It arrived a completely different tone, colder, almost grey. I emailed the supplier and then I just... kept it. Sat with the box open for two days. Now I'm building the whole piece around it. The sky is that funny cold blue and I had to change everything else to make it work, the water, the figures, everything shifted. I don't think I've made a better decision this month. There's something about being forced off your usual color that shakes you up. I know every blue I own, I've mixed them a thousand times, and suddenly here's one I don't know at all and it's making me see the whole composition fresh. Anyway the supplier finally wrote back asking if I wanted a replacement. Honestly I might order the same wrong batch again on purpose.

I'm working on a portrait, mostly glass smalti. The issue is the light catches the surface of some pieces too much, especially on the skin tones, and it looks almost like cheap plastic, not stone or glass. The tesserae themselves are fine, but the way the light hits them… it’s too uniform and bright. I’ve tried orienting pieces differently, but it’s not enough. Anyone else fought this? How did you solve it?

Not deep, barely a scratch. But it's on the pad of my left thumb, exactly where I press to feel the cut edge when I'm checking a tessera. So two days now I'm sitting here doing nothing, or worse, sorting by colour like an intern. The infuriating part is I did it being lazy. I have a small wooden jig for holding the small stuff when I score it. It was right there. I turned my head to answer the phone and pushed the wheel through with my thumb in the wrong place, like I've never held a hammer before. So now I have one panel that's 80 percent done and a thumb wrapped in tape like a cartoon character, and my neighbour Katerina keeps asking if I went to the doctor. For a cut. In Greece. My grandmother would laugh at me. Does anyone else have a body part that decides when they can work? Because mine is the thumb and I am not going to win this argument.

About four kilos of the stuff, in a canvas bag under the trestle. It came out of a hotel on Egnatia that got gutted years ago, I talked the foreman into letting me take the floor tiles before the skip arrived. Half of it is a green nobody would choose, that 1970s hospital green, and the pieces are too big and irregular to set nicely without recutting every one. I have used maybe a dozen of them in eight years. Every so often I tip the bag out on the floor and look at it for twenty minutes and put it back. My friend Eleni says throw it, and she is right in the practical sense, but the green is not a colour you can buy. It is a bad green and it is the only place in the world it exists now. Started a piece last week where I finally cut into a proper chunk of it. The dust smelled like a wet wall. Two days later it is still the wrong colour in the composition, but cutting it felt good, so it stays for now. Anyone else hoarding a material they know they will probably never finish using?

I keep a bucket under the work table for the pieces too small to hold with fingers. Anything under about a centimetre goes in, and every few months I tip it into the bin because it's just dust and shards and I can't use it. Except this time I needed a specific blue. The dark one, the one I bought in Ravenna eight years ago and can no longer get, because the man who made that batch died and nobody has his recipe. I needed maybe forty grams of it. And I stood there looking at an empty bucket. So now the bucket is staying. All of it. I will be that person with jars of coloured grit on the shelf, and my friend Eleni will make a face at it, and she can make the face. Anyone else hoarding something in the studio they know they can't really use?

Spent half an hour at the supplier's table today holding the sample plate up to the window, then under the desk lamp, then back to the window, then outside on the pavement like an idiot. Kept saying to the man the blue is too green. He kept saying it is the same blue as last time. It was not the same blue as last time. Ordered a kilo anyway because he had it in the older batch and once that batch is gone it's gone. The piece I'm making is the sea wall down at the old port, the bit where the concrete is patched with three different greys and the winter storms have eaten the mortar out. I have been collecting blues for it since March. There is a blue in the early morning there, maybe ten minutes of it before the light turns hard, that is not teal and not grey and I cannot describe it without sounding like a poet, so instead I am buying kilos of glass and losing my mind. Everyone thinks this job is about patience. Actually it is mostly about this. Standing in a shop arguing about whether a colour exists. Anyway. The kilo cost more than I'll get for the panel. I know. Don't.

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.

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.

For years I priced by the hour and then shaved a bit off because I felt bad. A 40x40 of the old harbour wall, three weeks of cutting, and I'd quote something like 600 euro and hear myself apologise while saying it. Then a conservator I trained under years ago told me, flat out, that my prices were insulting to the material. Not to me. To the smalti. That stuck. In January I went up 40% on everything. Same photos, same page, no announcement. I expected the inbox to go quiet. It didn't. One person asked if I could do a smaller size, which is fair, and we did. Same number of enquiries as the autumn before. The people who bought were exactly the people who bought before. I think what actually happened is I stopped flinching when I said the number, and that came through in the message. Before, I'd write three lines explaining why it cost what it cost, like a defence. Now it's one line, the size, the material, the price. Nobody has ever replied asking me to justify the smalti. The uncomfortable part: I could have done this two years ago and the rent would have been easier. I was the only one who thought the work was cheap.

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.

Fellow mosaicist cut my rates a while back. She told me there was no way to sell "real art" in this economy unless you priced to move, and honestly I listened for longer than I should have. Dropped a 60x80 piece from €1,400 to €900 thinking I was being smart. Then a client comes to pickup, a hotel owner who'd commissioned it. Looks at the invoice, looks at me, and says flat out: "You undersold yourself. That's an insult to the person buying it too." He paid me the full €1,400 on the spot and told me not to do it again. Thing is, he was right and I knew it. That piece was six weeks of work, smalti I'd imported from Venice, and I'd priced it like a print from IKEA. The friends-fear of pricing yourself out is real but the other direction is real too. When you don't value the work, the buyer reads it as low quality, not a bargain. Raised my floor back to €1,400 for anything with smalti in it. Lost one regular customer since. Still sleep fine. That hotel owner taught me more in one sentence than any pricing workshop ever did.

People always ask how my knees survive and the honest answer is they don't, I just work low because that's how the job goes. You can't set smalti on a table and see it true. So I'm down on the floor eight hours and the cats treat me like furniture. Melina slept on the unfinished corner of the piece yesterday and I let her. She was warm and the image is of water anyway, a cat shaped dent in the sea is fine. Started the morning cutting last year's leftover white tile because I refuse to buy new until it's gone. Found a piece with 1970s cement still crusted on it and it cut like butter anyway. Old stuff is better. New smalti has no patience in it. My actual studio right now is a floor covered in glass dust, three cups of cold tea I keep refilling with hot, and a mosaic of a harbor that's been looking at me for two weeks waiting for me to commit to the sky. I keep putting the blue down and taking it up. Somewhere in me I know the answer is fewer colors, not more. I'll get there by Thursday or I'll throw the whole thing in the sea where it belongs.

Pulled out a portrait panel I finished last spring, one I shipped to a client in Athens, and she sent me a close-up photo today asking if this was supposed to happen. The deep blue smalti has this white bloom creeped into the edges, right where the grout sits. Efflorescence, I know the word, I've seen it on outdoor work, but this thing has been in a dry apartment for six months. She's not angry, she's asking. But I don't have a good answer and it's eating at me. I used a standard grey grout, cured it properly, sealed it. The theory I've got now is I left the tiles a hair too close together on that section and the grout couldn't seat right, so moisture sat in the joint instead of drying out. I've done this twenty years. Still can't tell whether it's my mix, my joint width, or the stone itself weeping from somewhere I can't see. Anyone else seen smalti bloom like this indoors, or did I mess up the recipe and I should just own it and offer to re-grout on my dime?

Three years. Three years this thing sat under my workbench wrapped in old sheets, half-cut, wrong, not working. It's a portrait of my yiayia's hands, she was a seamstress, those hands knew things, and I could not get the light right in the smalti. The gold kept coming out flat, like a coin, not like afternoon sun on old skin. Took it back out two months ago and finally saw what was wrong. Wrong andamento, wrong direction of the cuts. I'd been setting the tesserae like fabric folds instead of like hands. Had to pull half of it out and start again. Sent photos to the client this afternoon. She cried. So did I, a bit, alone in the studio with the cats looking at me like I'd lost it. Anyway. Sometimes the work needs to wait until you're ready for it. That's the thing nobody tells you.

So for about a year I was making these short videos, nothing fancy, just my phone propped against a grout bucket while I cut smalti or set tesserae. No music, no voiceover, just the sound of the hammer and the tile nippers. Sometimes ten seconds. Sometimes two minutes. I posted them because I liked the rhythm of them, but they'd get maybe 40 views. I kept doing it anyway because I'm stubborn and I had the footage. Last month a journalist from a design magazine in London was researching mosaic technique for an article on craft revival. She found my videos. Not my finished pieces, the raw ones, the ones nobody watched. She said they showed the actual process in a way her readers never see. So now there's a four-page spread about my work and I got paid for the photos and she quoted me saying nice things about patience and it's lovely. But the thing is, the algorithm was right. Those videos were dead content by every metric. They just happened to be exactly what one specific person needed on one specific day in another country. I don't know what the lesson is. Maybe that "what works" is sometimes just persistence aimed at nobody until the right somebody shows up. Or maybe it's luck dressed up as strategy. I can't tell yet.

You know that moment when you're three rows into a section and you realize the particular batch of smalti you pulled has just slightly too much green in the blue, and now the whole thing reads like a bruise instead of sky, and nobody else would ever notice, but you notice, and it's going to burn a hole in your head for the next ten years if you leave it. So I unpicked the whole section. Recut the curve from a different batch. It took three days and the difference is barely there. But it's there. My conservator friends would say this is insane. My regular friends don't understand why I didn't just paint it. My cat sat on the loose pieces twice. Anyway the curve is right now. Worth it? I'll let you know when my knees forgive me. 🙃

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.