Sushi Platter Ornament

We do, and the Sushi Platter is one of the larger pieces in the Chive food range, sold here directly. My friend Imogen ordered hers before she had a tree, which is her standard approach to most purchases and most restaurants. The tree arrived eleven days later, by which point she had already decided where the platter was going. She told it so.

It works, and part of why is that it does not read as a one-person gift. A board with nine separate elements looks like something two colleagues went in on together, so the office spends the afternoon crediting the wrong pair of people. Imogen let that run for a week before correcting anybody. She enjoyed the week.

Give it to whoever in the group decides where everyone is eating. Imogen holds that position permanently, has never applied for it, and has never been challenged, because the alternative is forty minutes of everybody being polite about noodles. She orders for the table without consulting the table. The table has stopped minding.

Hand-blown glass throughout, hand-painted, with every element on the board placed individually instead of stamped or transferred. That is why the rice reads as grains rather than as a pale block. Imogen counted the pieces out loud when she unpacked hers, got to nine, and then counted again because she thought she had missed one. She had not.

The board runs 2 inches wide and 5 inches tall overall, which makes it tall for a food piece and narrow enough to hang square rather than pitching forward. It holds its own beside much larger ornaments. Imogen measured hers against a photograph she had taken of the tree, which is a step most people skip. She skips nothing.

Let it dry fully if the tree has been near a window, then wrap the board flat with tissue over the chopstick end, which is the part most likely to catch on something in a crowded box. Imogen stores hers on its own, in a shallow container, face up. Everything she owns is stored face up.

Look for the other flat, plated, horizontal pieces rather than the round ones — boards, plates, trays, anything that hangs wide instead of dangling. A tree made only of spheres reads as wallpaper. Imogen groups by silhouette and has explained the principle to me three times, each time as though for the first. I now agree with it.

No, it does not come in a gift box — it ships in protective transit packaging built to get a large, detailed board through the post intact, which is a different job. Imogen wrapped hers for a colleague in a sheet of the menu from the restaurant where they first ate together. He kept the wrapping and put the ornament on his tree. Both survived.