You Hand Over a Pattern, You Collect the Finished Ornaments… and Ask Why They Look Completely Different. A Craftsman's Confession.

You Hand Over a Pattern, You Collect the Finished Ornaments… and Ask Why They Look Completely Different. A Craftsman's Confession.

When you run a workshop, consistency across a collection is everything. You design a pattern, refine the details, choose the colours, and you want every series in the shop to look exactly as you planned. But working with people in handmade craft can surprise you more than the unpredictable physics of a burner.

I drove a batch of bare ornaments to a decorator. I left the pieces, laid out the exact pattern, and we went through every detail together. A week later, I get a call: "I'm finished they're ready to collect!"

I drive over, open the box, pull out the card with my design, look at the finished ornaments… and see something else entirely. Instead of the agreed pattern, I am looking at a completely new and joyful creative interpretation.

I ask, calmly:

"Excuse me why do these look so different from the pattern I left?"

The decorator looks at me with a disarming smile and replies, with complete seriousness:

"Because they're prettier this way."

In that moment my hands dropped to my sides but a second later I couldn't help smiling. In the craft arts, the rigour of factory repeatability sometimes collides with the unbridled vision of the person holding the brush. A machine in a pressing plant will produce 1,000 identical pieces without blinking. A living person at a brush? They add their own character, their own gesture and sometimes their own aesthetic corrections, without asking anyone's permission.

In the end, the collection still had to meet my standards. But that conversation still makes me smile every time I sit down to plan a new pattern.

And you which would you prefer in your home: perfect 1:1 repeatability, or those "personal touches" straight from the brush?