Introduction to Kintsugi

Oops...

In September we moved back east from Seattle to Chicago. With all moves, there's a risk of your possessions not surviving the trip. Cross-country moves worsen your odds by orders of magnitude. Your stuff is in transit for much longer and it's often sharing a truck with other people's stuff which comes and goes depending on the route the movers take to your destination.

So we called it a win when we finished unpacking and the entire body count added up to one Ikea drinking glass and one of our bowls.

The glass shards were discarded without a second thought, but the bowl was a blow. It is an East Fork Pottery Everyday Bowl, and our collection are by far our most used dishware. They are exactly the right size for a healthy portion of pretty much anything: stir fry, pasta, chili, falafel bowls, salads. When it comes to dinner, if we don't need a plate for the meal, we reach for the bowls.

There's also a bit of sentimental value tied up in the collection. My uncle bought us our first pieces back in the early days of the company. By which I mean he bought a box of fired clay chips with different glazes and a link to a website to place our color choices. East Fork doesn't do that anymore, which is a pity because it was a delight to be involved in picking your pieces in such a tactile manner.

This was back before East Fork blew up the way it has. I don't follow home goods trends at all, but from what I understand they are the hit thing these days. So we benefited massively from my uncle being so heavily involved in the North Carolina pottery scene—we were East Fork collectors before it was cool.

We've added a lot since then, mostly through gifts and purchase over the years (I think I might still have an outstanding gift certificate from COVID I should ask them about...). But the bowls are the best pieces and losing one in the move meant we were down to five—an awkward number by any standard.

In modern culture, the default is to chuck things that are broken. Usually it's because the cost of replacing it is so much lower than fixing it, but more and more I wonder if we're just depriving ourselves of the opportunity to attempt the repairs ourself. A repaired item has so much more character; the act of fixing something elevates it from "a thing" to "a thing I care about."

I'm not as skilled at fixing physical objects as my forefathers, but I did have an idea for how to go about returning the bowl back into rotation.

Enter kintsugi

Turns out, broken pottery has been an issue for as long as there has been pottery. One repair technique that leaked into my corner of the internet is the east Asian tradition of gold joinery, kintsugi in Japanese. In the traditional practice, an artisan binds shards of broken pottery together with urushi lacquer dusted with metallic powder (gold, silver, platinum). Instead of hiding the breaks, the repaired piece celebrates its scars. The results can be striking:

Photo Credit: David Pike

Kintsugi is practiced today around the world. Not all practitioners use the traditional methods; urushi lacquer is expensive and according to the subreddit it can be quite fussy and hard to work with for beginners. As with any niche, the rabbit hole goes deep. There are pros and cons to different lacquers and metal powders. Many industrial epoxies and resins are not food safe. Replacing missing chunks can be a challenge.

I'm not looking to become a die hard practitioner of the art. I had a practical problem to solve—returning one of our bowls back into rotation. Fussy lacquers I could handle if I had to, but I wanted some structure and at least some guidance on how to approach things. Most important was the finished product would be food safe. The point is to use the repaired bowl!

The internet provided. I found a kintsugi kit on Etsy put together by a Belgian shop. They seemed fairly well-respected in the community based on some cursory research, and while they preferred a non-traditional resin and gold mica vs powdered metal it was graded food-safe so it would fit the bill. It came in a few days, it had all the tools necessary in a nice little box, and a simple set of instructions on how to put your pottery back together.

Armed with everything I needed, I did nothing for several weeks. It was only when we went to my parents' new lake house for Thanksgiving that I saw a space to finally give it a go.

Sand, stir, spread, dust, repeat

The repair was a simple process, but simple does not mean easy. A kintsugi repair is no different to gluing anything back together:

1. Sand and clean the binding surfaces to maximize sticking ability

2. Mix up your glue or epoxy and apply it to one side

3. Hold the pieces together until the glue sets

Kintsugi has an additional step where you dust the partially set resin with your metal powder of choice. The idea is the resin is tacky enough to pick up the extra powder, giving it a nice glossy sheen.

Simple enough.

However, before doing any of that I decided to hit my bowl with a hammer:

At this point in the process, I had yet to disabuse myself of delusions of grandeur. I thought it was going to come out as perfectly as the kintsugi repairs I'd seen on the internet. Which meant if I'd repaired the bowl as it was, I'd have this odd little gold circle repair on one side of the piece. Better to have a nice interesting spider crack across the whole thing.

Plus, splitting the bowl was incredibly satisfying. I turned it upside down, put a chisel on the base, and gave it a nice firm tap with a hammer. It obliged at once, breaking cleanly into three new shards. A test fit showed I'd have an excellent web of lines in the finished result. Pleased with the result, I set to work sanding the edges smooth, getting ready to put it back together.

The instruction book in the kit had listed "not sanding enough" as a common mistake made by beginners. I assumed what that was referring to was someone giving the edges a brief sand and leaving loose chips still attached to the edges. I gave each piece a thorough sanding with the provided sandpaper (120 grit), taking away several sharp enamel chips and coating everything in ceramic dust. The whole area smelled like burning clutch.

In retrospect, I wish I'd actually spent even more time sanding than I did. I successfully avoided the beginner trap of trying to glue a dirty, brittle surface together, but kintsugi adds the complication of trying to make your glue visible, not hide it in the join. I gave the edges of each piece a nice smooth edge which would be great for wood or a plastic model. What I should have done (and what I now realize the instructions were alluding to) was sand each edge back to create a channel for the resin to sit in when each piece was pushed together. Pushing the pieces together forces the resin out from between them; if you have a channel for it to flow into then you cut back on mess and your join does not noticeably stick out above the join. If the channel isn't there, the excess resin pours out onto the surface of the pottery. This stuff doesn't wipe away easily; it's tackier than your run-of-the-mill epoxy, and any residue you leave behind will be sparkly on account of the gold powder I was about to mix in.

Top: edges sanded back to create a channel for the resin. Bottom: my edges, smooth but with nowhere for the resin to go

Mixing the resin up was just like working with epoxy. Combine the two agents onto a bit of paper with a dab of gold powder, stir them up to start the reaction. I had gloves, which was good because this stuff irritated on contact—I got a bit on my wrist and had an angry red mark for the rest of the evening.

It was also much stickier than I was expecting, so wiping bits up with my finger (something I would have done with epoxy) was a mistake since for the rest of the process those fingers did their best to stick to anything I touched. Having some extra sets of gloves in reserve would have been a good move.

It went on without too much difficulty, though it ran a bit more easily than expected. My definition of "a thin spread" clearly was too much, particularly without having sanded out a channel for the excess, so pushing it together beaded up the resin into unsightly lumps everywhere. Adding the extra layer of powder was easy enough, though I did make it more difficult on myself by attempting to apply it to wet resin early in the process and gluing the brush bristles to one another.

Working from the base outwards, it took me about forty minutes of mixing, gluing, holding and brushing to reassemble the bowl. Reassemble it I did, though it was, to put it kindly, a mess:

But I had a reassembled bowl, so I was no worse off than I had been when I started the project. The real question was cleanup: how easy was it going to be to remove the excess and would doing so ruin the bowl in the process?

What lies beneath

The kit provided a small craft chisel and some vague instructions about how to remove the excess. It wasn't a particularly sharp chisel, and I did find myself wishing I'd addressed that fact before diving in, but I was concerned about scratching the existing glaze.

Which took the punishment like a champ! I left exactly one visible scratch on the bowl, and that was when I purposely tried to scratch it on the bottom. Big blobs of lacquer or thin films left by my sticky gloves—both came up without any visible damage to the original pottery. I spent an hour or two and got most of the way to clean with the chisel alone.

The big dilemmas were the spots where the chisel couldn't get up the excess lacquer film and the spots where the gold powder was not coming off by chisel or by washing it. Chiseling also had the side effect of dulling a lot of the gloss of the lacquer in the cracks; it was a pale ochre with a hint of sparkle now, not the glittery gold it had been earlier in the afternoon.

I took a huge risk and went in with the finest sandpaper I could find at my parents' place (320 grit). The idea was to buff out the last of the gold and glue while hopefully buffing up the existing lacquer and getting a bit more color out of it. Of course, it had every chance to backfire and scuff up the existing glaze, ruining the original finish in the attempt. It would still have been functional, just relegated to the pile of misfit projects (and certainly not a bowl I'd put in front of a guest at the dinner table!).

Here's where I lucked out a bit. The original glaze had a matte finish, and was a dark forest green. The fine grit of the sandpaper did take off a few thin layers, but because there was no gloss to mar it wasn't actually noticeable. Just like the scratch I made, the only spot you can tell where I sanded was on the bottom, though in that case it's more due to the contrast around the logo stamp than an intentional spot of damage. All the spots that did have gold residue were cleaned up with the light abrasion long before I took enough off to be visible.

The final result

By dinner time I'd finished cleaning up the piece to my satisfaction. While not the bright, glossy lines I'd hope to get, the cracks are sealed and they retained some of the coloring. When the light catches it right, they glitter and sparkle. The main reason for the dimmer result was the cleaning process. Because I had so much excess resin and it had bubbled out so much (both due to over-applying and not sanding out a channel) I was forced to chisel it off, taking the powder responsible for the finish with it.

There were some additional "baking" steps involved to make sure everything was fully set and the piece was food safe. Since then, the bowl has re-entered service, bringing our collection up to seven (we got a replacement in the meantime). The resin has held beautifully; I'm convinced that a new impact would more likely break the ceramic than shatter along the existing cracks.

Overall, it was a fun project and the first time in a while I've done something craft-y like this. I've got a few other projects on the back burner to attend to; next time I go up to the lake I think I'll bring the Catan expansion my brother 3D printed for me and finish painting that. And while I don't intend to go around smashing pottery, there is a small bit of me just looking for an excuse to do things better next time.