An inch and a quarter for a six inch pencil
The thicknesses here run to 1 1/4 inch, 3/4 and 3/8, on pieces as small as 3/8 by 6 inches.
That is an unusual amount of material for a trim piece and it is structural rather than decorative. A thin narrow strip of unfired clay is fragile at every stage between the mold and the kiln, so the section stays deep enough to survive the handling.
Unglazed, like the field tile
Natural and matte cover this whole range, which on a clay tile means unglazed: the fired body with nothing over it.
That matters more on trim than on a field tile. A glazed edge against an unglazed floor is visible along the entire run, and the whole point of a terracotta molding is that it is the same material as the tile it borders rather than a finished version of it. Terracotta tile is the field.
The color is the clay
Red and brown make up the colors here, which is what fired clay does rather than a decision anybody made.
Terracotta means baked earth, and the color comes from iron in the clay oxidizing in the kiln. Two pieces from different batches will differ slightly for the same reason two field tiles do, and on trim that variation runs along an edge where it is more visible than it would be across a floor.
Small profiles, and one wider cap
The sizes run 3/8x6, 1x6, 1x8, 2x8 and 3x8.
The narrow ones are pencils and liners; the 2x8 and 3x8 are caps and steps. Those wider pieces are the ones that finish the top of a terracotta wainscot or the nose of a step, which in a clay floor is a job nothing else can do convincingly.
Where it has to be used
Wherever a terracotta surface stops and the edge is visible: the top of a backsplash, the end of a run, the nose of a step, the junction with plaster.
A metal profile against unglazed clay is a harder combination than it is against a glazed tile, because the clay has no finished face of its own for the metal to relate to. Moldings takes the trim across the other materials.
Thickness against the floor
Hand-made terracotta field tile runs at 3/4 of an inch and more, and these pieces run from 3/8 up to 1 1/4.
So matching the trim to the floor is not automatic, and the figure on each listing has to be read against the tile it is going next to rather than assumed. Spanish reclaimed terracotta is the salvaged end of the same material.
