Large Blocks at www.japanese-home-gardens.com

A large area of paving blocks likely to receive considerable traffic should be bedded on mortar on a prepared foundation. Start to lay the blocks in one corner of the patio and work diagonally across the surface. This makes it easier to ensure that they are laid consistently flat. Place i/zin thick offcuts of wood between the blocks as consistent joint spaces, or simply butt up the blocks for finer joints. As you work across the surface, kneel on a piece of board to distribute your weight.

One way was to close the entrance by large blocks which followed the same pattern as the surface of the pyramid, thus disguising the entrance from the outside. Another was to stop up the passageway by monolithic blocks, lowered like a portcullis after the burial. Still another was to build two chambers, one of which was left empty. None of the efforts to protect the royal burials succeeded, however. Even in early antiquity they were plundered, and none of the numerous pyramids have come down to us undisturbed.

Fapillon's influence (about 1688). Jean Papillon, a Frenchman, was the first to make paper designs in repeating patterns that would match on all sides when the separate sheets were pasted together. Papillon produced his patterns by carving them in large wood-blocks, covering the blocks with the necessary pigments, and then pressing them against sheets of paper. In this way he could make a much greater quantity of patterned paper than by painting each sheet separately. By using separate blocks for each color, he could print any pattern in any number of colors desired. Papillon is the real inventor of wallpaper as it is known today.