#6: Trial and error. Mostly error.

Mixed successes today. Whilst I was able to prepare mugi-urushi for my blue mug’s handle before, I just couldn't get the consistency right today and gave up after 2 attempts. I think the first batch definitely had too much water but the second batch reached chewing gum consistency but wouldn't adhere to the piece, stretching across it rather than spreading.

It could be because I applied ki-urushi to the joining faces which prepares them for the mugi-urushi and is how POJ Studio suggest doing it, but I found more success without the ki-urushi with my mug. I decided to cut my loses for the day and focus on something else but it was all useful learning.

The Bordallo Pinheiro olive dish is now ready to have the gold applied to it. I think that next weekend I'll do a couple of practice runs with gold on tiles just to get a feeling for it before applying it to the dish. I want to give it a thorough clean with white spirit or turps beforehand to remove any oils that it's picked up during the repair so that the gold has less to adhere to.

I've also been given a large Poole Pottery Persian Deer Vase from a colleague which was broken a long time ago and repaired by her father. The first issue here was working out how to undo the repair which was done with some kind of glue or putty. It was quite solid in some places but still malleable in others despite being decades old.

There's still a lot of fixant on the joining surfaces so the next job will be to clean all of that off which I think will be satisfyingly simple, if labour intensive, to round off a mixed day.