Kintsugi (take two)

Sorry about the formatting of the previous email, folks. Resending, this time with line breaks.

Kintsugi is an ancient Japanese technique of repairing old broken objects, especially porcelain & ceramic ones, with gold-dusted or gold-mixed lacquer. You have seen this before. It is fairly easy to do yourself, with the right materials.

Sometimes, kintsugi is deliberate. A piece is broken on purpose and mended. Or the piece is created with kintsugi. But most of the time, kintsugi is done to something that you didn’t intend to break.

And that’s where I found myself a year or so ago, when I broke a mug. I found that mug in 2018 at a local craft show, was drawn to the glaze, bought precisely one of it. I used it one day in 2020, threw it in the kitchen sink, and in the process of filling the dishwasher it slipped out of my hands and dropped back into the sink, cracking noticeably down one side. It was not major, but it would leak, and the whole purpose of a mug is to not leak. I went back to the maker’s website, thinking I could buy a replacement, but no, the ceramicist was eternally sold out. Fine.