Chinese tea · linen, stitch, numerals
A number, a stitch, a blank tag
Thirty-four Chinese teas laid on oatmeal linen with tailoring marks — a numeral drawn in running stitch, a grid of numbers with one ringed, and a garment tag left empty.
Chinese tea · linen, stitch, numerals
Thirty-four Chinese teas laid on oatmeal linen with tailoring marks — a numeral drawn in running stitch, a grid of numbers with one ringed, and a garment tag left empty.
7 teas · 5 categories
The loudest element on the page is a number, and a number makes no claim — it only says where a thing sits in a sequence. That is a fair way to present thirty-four teas, because none of them needs an adjective to earn its place. The marks are all borrowed from making rather than selling: basting stitches, registration crosses, a tag left empty because the tag is the object being shown, not a label to be filled in. Linen is used as the ground because it is the same weight of surface the tea itself has — dry, matte, woven — and a glossy page would fight the leaf. Where a logo would normally go, a stitched line goes instead, so the mark is a construction detail rather than a signature. The rings around one number in the grid are the only decision announced anywhere on the page. Chinese tea takes this well because its own labels are already numeric — grades, harvest years, pressing dates — and a shop can be honest by simply keeping them visible.