How I Fix Damaged Mugs (Iron Plucking)

This is a quick fix that works remarkably well. It’s a shame I didn’t have the exact same ‘brown’ clay body to mend these holes, I would have had to sacrifice one of these mugs in order to obtain it.   Unknowingly to me, large blots of iron stuck portions of these cups down onto the kiln shelf during the firing, which meant that when I went to remove them, they sort of tore away, leaving these jagged crevices on the bottoms of the pots.   As it’s not near the rim, a quick and robust fix is to smash up a clay body that’s similar in tone, I then gather the very finest dust this creates and I add it to a dollop of epoxy. The lot is stirred up and I flood the hole with it. Initially, I overload it so that the stony-mixture is sitting proud and then I let it harden over a few days.   Finally, the excess is ground back using a rotary tool and due to all of those particles of clay the epoxy contains it feels incredibly hard, almost like fired stoneware in fact. This section is all about feel. I’m constantly touching the area I’m grinding and I continuously dab it with water to wash the site dry, the water also helps the tool grind a bit more efficiently too. It has to be flush with the rest of the surface, that’s my main goal, meaning that when I pass a finger over the fixed spot, I shouldn’t be able to feel it.   I’ve done this in the past with some soda fired work from where the waddings had torn out large fragments from the case of the cup. They were made with black clay and thus, I found a black cup that was a genuine third, (unsellable), and smashed it to bits. The fixed area was practically invisible once all was said and done and even when you dry say, a fingernail over it, due to all the powdered stoneware packed into the resin, it feels just like you’re scratching stoneware.   I know that epoxy is generally not food safe, hence why this is something I only ever really do on the bases of pots, where your lips will never come into contact with it. But in this case, it turns a third into a second, in my opinion, provided it has been done very carefully and neatly.   #satisfying #pottery #ceramics #craft #asmr