Chinese tea · quilted lattice
The leaf is set on a quilted grid
Thirty-four Chinese teas arranged as discs on a cannage lattice stitched in gold, with bees and lily-of-the-valley at the intersections. Navy, cream, one line of pale pink.
Chinese tea · quilted lattice
Thirty-four Chinese teas arranged as discs on a cannage lattice stitched in gold, with bees and lily-of-the-valley at the intersections. Navy, cream, one line of pale pink.
3 teas · 3 categories
The quilted lattice is the whole structure of the page, and it is useful rather than pretty: a regular diamond field gives the round pile of leaf a scale to be measured against, so a flat Longjing spear and a tight pu-erh bud can be compared at a glance. Everything decorative is small and metal — a bee, a star, a sprig — pinned at the points where the stitching crosses, so ornament never lands on the tea itself. Chinese tea goes well with this because the category is already sorted by grade and by size of pick, and a grid is a fair way to show size. Colour is held to two grounds, navy and cream, with pink allowed once as a ribbon and gold only as thread. Letterspaced caps keep the names quiet and long, which suits pinyin that a reader may be sounding out for the first time. Restraint here is not a mood; it is what makes the leaf the loudest thing in the frame.