Historical outline of the tradition

Sand pattern sprinkling on clay floors in houses or on yards, in celebration of religious festivals or guest visiting, was a fleeting art form in folk decorative art. Its effects could be admired only until the patterns were trodden down by the household members. This custom spread in the nineteenth century, however, according to some sources, it may be much older. Territorially, it was mostly connected to central Poland, to the regions on the left bank of the Vistula river, including Kuyavia. However, it might have had much bigger reach, which is proved by several examples of the custom noted in various parts of Greater Poland. This type of decorative art was characteristic not only for Polish folk culture. It was also present from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1950s in the same context in the area of Flanders in de Kempen region on the border of Belgium and the Netherlands.

In Poland it started to disappear at the beginning of the twentieth century with more and more frequent use of wooden floors in rooms. In the interwar period, sand sprinkled patterns decorated only hallways and kitchens with clay floors, and with time, it was limited to yards and paths leading to houses. In the 1950s sprinkling sand patterns was practised in the regions of Kielce, Opoczno, Rawa, Łowicz and Kuyavia where folk ornamentation traditions and handicraft survived the longest.