Kintsugi

[Jubal]

It's now a while since I posted the thread "Fixing The Mug", and I finally have an update on it!

To recap, my favourite tea mug, which I got at a potter's shop in Lemba, Cyprus, got broken about four years ago because I'm an idiot and knock things on the floor sometimes. It broke into two neat pieces so I decided I might try and fix it somehow rather than letting it go to waste. In the end, rather than just try glueing it, I got a kintsugi kit, which you can get at reasonable prices from a Dutch company called Humade (link) and used that. Kintsugi should be food-safe, but unfortunately on close inspection there was a second hairline crack in the mug that runs round in the other direction from the handle, which was the focal point of the break. Rather than try to break the mug along a second axis in order to repair it fully, I decided that the mug should accept its fate as a future planter, and just fixed it along the main break line.

And here are the pictures, including one final one with a little plant I bought last year in Frankfurt which is now living fairly happily in the mug on the same ledge as my schefflera. I think the gold vein effect works really, really well, and the neat pottery break was pretty easy to use the stuff on in a way that created a single, neat raised vein which looks right.





Having done the mug, my mother gave me a significantly harder task - I went from a pottery mug in two neat parts to attempting to fix a horribly fractured blue glass tea-bowl which had ten or eleven broken fragments. This was a much slower process - I had to do it join by join, and each join requires 10-20 mins of pressing by hand while it does the initial setting process. It was harder with the smooth glass to avoid blobby effects (and sometimes blobs were needed to fill in gaps where bits of glass had been lost). Also, the end result on the rim wasn't perfect - one of the downsides of kintsugi is that it does have a relatively high bulk compared to a glueing method, so if you use it on several pieces that need to connect back together in a circle, the circle won't quite form any more because each piece has the resin edge that's extended a little further than it originally did.

All that said, the combination of gold vein and blue glass is so nice in pure colour-scheme terms that I think it outweighs most of my errors and leaves something that looks kind of pretty in its own imperfect way. It was a fun project all round, and I'd certainly consider using the technique on other things in future.