Sophie from Bridge Learning Campus, Bristol sent in the following, which pleased me in the way that she describes her work.

  1. I did the teacups first, white teacups first going down diagonally, top left to bottom right, green tea cups next going diagonally down from the top right to bottom left. It didn't matter which one I did first.
 2. I did the red teacups in the places I could put them and added the blue teacups to the empty spaces.
 3. Next I did the saucers on the top row to match the cup and saucer, I did the column going downwards on the left and repeated it on the other columns until I found the pattern.
 4. I looked at the shapes with my teacher and by joining the blue cups, I started to see a parallelogram in the blue cups and one the same in the red teacups.
5. I changed teacups and saucers for numbers and saw that there were patterns in the numbers, when I drew shapes over the same numbers for the saucers, I saw four triangle like shapes with the points going into the four corners. I enjoyed the investigation!

More than half of the solutions had a common slip-up in that there were several combinations of cups and saucers that were repeated. The challenge is to have them mixed up so that no two cup/saucers werre the same. I was very pleased to see that various computer programs were being used to send in the solutions, like Samuel, Minc and Julian from Manilla who sent this in:

 

However I've put all the solutions into the same format for easy comparison. Well done!  All of you listed here: