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When we fire a tile, something invisible happens. The clay loses water. It gets smaller. For our wall body clay, that shrinkage is around seven percent. For our porcelain, it's closer to nine.
Most people don't think about shrinkage until they're ordering a custom arch for a doorway. Then it becomes everything.
How We Account for Shrinkage
Here's the real workflow: A client sends us a template — ideally a cardboard cutout of the actual opening. (This is gold. Architectural drawings are great, but they sometimes don't match what actually gets built on site.)
We import that template into Photoshop. We decide if it's an eyebrow arch or a true half-round. We scale it up by seven percent — that's our shrinkage buffer. Then we draw cut lines so our production team knows exactly where to cut each key before the clay shrinks.
The shrinkage happens in two places. Most of it happens during drying — the clay goes from wet to bone dry, and that's where the magic (and the math) happens. The rest happens during the bisque firing. Our low-fire talc body doesn't shrink anymore after that.
Here's the trick with moldings: they have thick parts and thin parts. The thinner sections tend to shrink a little more. So we flange them out slightly to keep the grout joints even. Without that, you'd get wedge-shaped joints. Nobody wants that.
Why Shrinkage Isn't Always Exactly Seven Percent
This is the part that makes handmade tile actually handmade.
We use a wet clay body — not a powder-pressed dry body like mega factories do. We recycle our clay. In the summer, it might evaporate a little. In the winter, it holds more moisture. That water content affects shrinkage.
So our tiles aren't exactly the same size, batch to batch. Not wildly different — we keep quality control tight. But there's subtle variation. That's not a flaw. That's a signature of the craft.
What Installers and Designers Need to Know
First: the sizing on our website is nominal, not actual. Expect slight variation in size and shape.
Second: if you're ordering custom arches, cap pieces, or trim to fit specific openings — send us a template. Not a CAD drawing. An actual cardboard cutout of the real opening. That template is worth more than any architectural drawing because it accounts for what actually got built, not what was planned.
Third: when you're installing, use grout spacers as a guide, not a rule. If an individual tile needs a tiny wiggle to make the lines look better, that's not a mistake. That's an installer doing their job. The end result will look lovely because each tile has its own personality.
That's handmade tile. Not uniform. Not interchangeable. Real.
