#2: Back at it

Following an unplanned break due to childcare and moving house, I’m glad to be back at my desk with a plan for progress with kintsugi and Kintsugi Jones. In the short term, I’ll have a chunk of dedicated time to kintsugi each week which will result in more practice, more posts, more commissions, more stock, and more everything else. In the longterm, I’ll be able to spend two days a week working on kintsugi resulting in even more of everything!

This week I’ve been taking stock of projects and establishing a new approach to my work. I have a small backlog of commissions which have comes to me in the last year which are finally getting looked at and a handful that were nearing completion when I had to stop last year. I’ll dust off the cobwebs with some non-commission pieces before finishing the ones already in progress and return them to their very patient owners. I was a little unsure of what kind of state my urushi would be in as it’s meant to only have a shelf life of about a year before it’s unusable. Whilst the red and black are maybe a bit more viscous than I remember them being, they both loosened up with a bit of turps. I’ll need to see how they act on a piece but I’m hopeful that they’re fine so that I don’t need to order more.

A new step I’ve included in the process is to write up a “patient chart” for each piece before beginning any work at all. This allows me to capture important details about the piece and conduct an in-depth review of the extent of the damage and repair required, along with a sketch. My drawing skills are…… limited but that’s something I’m also hoping to improve over time as well as a happy by-product of the practice.

Happy to be back at it!