Good morning all! We hope you are keeping safe and well in the time of  Coronavirus . We just wanted to  give you  an update with regards to our tiles, as stocks have been a little low for the last few months.
The good news is, our warehouse is a one-man operation – our dear Gaff works there alone and  we can continue to ship your tile orders from Bristol! The next news item is that our new shipment of tiles should arrive within a fortnight. They arrive by sea freight container, so we never know precisely when the ship will dock, but as soon as it has we can set about restocking most of the tiles which have gotten low on our website. Thank you for bearing with us during this time!
It was with a heavy heart that we recognised that we had to find a new tile-maker  last spring, as the workshop we’d been working with for over twenty-five years moved to a more mechanised process. Progress ! We have always wanted to sell genuinely handmade products at Milagros, which means handmade from start to finish. Our supplier was starting to machine extrude the clay for the tile biscuit  (the unglazed clay tile squares) rather than rolling it out by hand . This makes for a more regular tile with a more uniform finish, but it was to the loss of the wonderful irregularities that we love so much. You can tell a genuinely handmade tile by the variations in the glazed surface: some are ever so slightly convex or concave, and, when laid side by side, they make for a beautifully pillowed texture. (If ever you’re in the neighbourhood and want to see this in the wild, why not grab a coffee at Pavilion across the street from Milagros, in Columbia Road: those are our Claro Green and Puro White tiles on the walls).
S0, Tom set off a year ago to find another tile maker in Dolores Hidalgo (the traditional home of this style of handmade – Talavera – tile in Mexico). After weeks of searching and asking around he found that most tile making “fabricas” (workshops/factories), of which there are many, had moved over to the more industrial process in recent years. However, a pottery that Milagros has worked with for some years was willing, with some help, to start making handmade tiles. After a number of teething problems this is  now  the second shipment,  on a ship bound for the UK, with a third one to follow in July. And it transpires that this is now one of the only workshops making this style of genuinely handmade tiles  in Mexico! If Tom has inadvertently had a small hand in keeping this key craft tradition alive, it is also down to you and your continued support of the shop, for which we are always very grateful, but especially at this time.
If you want more information about the tile-making process, how to lay them in your home, or to watch this short film made at the old workshop, you can find it all on our website. If you have any questions before or after purchase, we are happy to speak on the phone or over e-mail. And we love to hear from past customers too, so if you would like to send us snaps of your tiles in their forever homes for our Instagram, we’d love to see them!
Buena salud,
Milagros
