Tile Making by Mike Evans

When my partner, David, and I bought our present house it was a tool hire shop which had lain empty for several years. Prior to that it had been a co-operative grocery and was originally built as a bakery around 1876. By now it had no stairwell in the building and a 1950's plate-glass shop-front. There was clearly much to be done.

Whilst shopping for materials for decoration we called into Fired Earth in Tunbridge Wells. We liked the look of a range of handmade tiles. They had a natural variation and were slightly uneven which we found attractive. "They would be great for the kitchen" we thought. Then we saw the price: about £6 per tile and that was for the plain ones! Beating a hasty retreat I muttered something along the lines of "making flat tiles is hard – making wobbly ones should be a doddle, even I could do that!"

The tiles I eventually got round to making are based on a grogged version of my normal throwing body: a studio white earthenware from Potclays, supplied by Jackie Topping in Sevenoaks. After a couple of false starts I settled on slightly adapted version of a lead fluxed transparent blue glaze given by Fenella Malalieu in Ceramic Review. The glaze materials and the tile cutter came from the Clay Cellar near Paddock Wood. To enable me to fire enough tiles in my small kiln I invested in a double tile crank from Potterycrafts.

I have a set of plywood ware-boards in the pottery, and the clay is initially rolled out into a rectangle on one of these using a rolling pin. A disposable kitchen cloth laid on the board for the remainder of the rolling facilitates the movement of the clay and leaves slight texture in the surface which is picked up by the glaze. I don't worry about creases in the cloth as the resulting lines add interest to the tiles. For the last roll-out I place wooden battens either side of the clay to ensure a consistent thickness.

The tiles are cut out using the tile cutter and placed onto one of the ware boards. I score the upper surface, which will be the back. This helps to prevent the tiles from curling up as they dry and gives a good grip into the tile cement when they are used. All the same it is important to keep an eye on them as they dry and to turn them several times to keep them as flat as possible. To make a pattern for the top row of tiles I impressed them with some decorative wooden moldings I found at B&Q. When leather hard I chamfer the edges of the tiles by hand using a potter's knife.

The first firing is to 1160°C. This is close to the maturing temperature of the clay so they are fired in small stacks laid flat on the kiln shelves. After glazing they are mounted in the tile cranks for glaze firing to 1060°C. Because the tiles are only supported by their corners in the cranks I found that a high temperature glazing will cause them to twist, making them useless.

The clay of machine-made commercial wall tiles is not fired so close to maturing and as a result they can be cut by scoring the glaze and breaking them over an edge. My tiles are much denser, and the scoring on the back means that technique is unlikely to work. I thought I might have to make custom tiles to fit the odd-shaped spaces rather than cut them. To my surprise though, they cut perfectly using an abrasive wheel electric tile cutter. I mounted the tiles using a combined waterproof "fix-and-grout" compound.

I'm not sure I would like to make tiles for a living – I would probably have to charge as much as Fired Earth, if not more. It took several false starts and the kitchen has been without tiles for a long time. However, we are very pleased with the result. In the same way that I got a buzz from drinking from the first mug I ever made, it's rewarding to see the tiles every morning and know that they are truly hand made.

The job completed