How to Repair a Vintage Teacup？
Porcelain is accidentally broken, but there are ways to repair it. There are two popular repair techniques, called Baking and Kintsugi. Here is a brief introduction to Kintsugi.
Kintsugi is a kind of traditional restoration technology, which is aimed at repairing and improving the damaged and incomplete parts of porcelain, pottery, and purple sand objects, and pursues the aesthetic feeling of art at a higher level.
The general steps are gap treatment, bonding, water grinding, (if the wound treatment is not smooth enough, you can perform a second filling process of bonding, water grinding), painting, and gold painting.
The tools that need to be used are a small file stick, lacquer, flour, a small wood block, water, sandpaper, vermilion lacquer, a meticulous brush, gold powder, and a soft brush.
Step One: Processing of the gap
The breakage of the vintage teacup is divided into broken and damaged. Take a vintage teacup as broken. Broken means that it has been broken into several pieces, but it can be completely spliced together, and only needs to be glued. Loss refers to the loss of part, a gap that needs to be filled.
Gap processing preparations.
For example, in the tea cup in the picture, because the gap is flat if it is directly bonded, the — thickness produced after the final paint and gold will make the cup surface have a raised part, and the gold surface will be worn during later use.
Groove on both sides of the broken pieces
Step Two: Gluing
Kintsugi uses lacquer for bonding. The lacquer itself has no plasticity, so you can add flour to it, apply it to the gap, and bond the porcelain together along the gap.
As the glued paint is squeezed, some parts will be squeezed out and can be hung along the edge of the mouth, which can reduce the time for polishing the mouth surface.
If there are missing gaps, use the same principle to fill in the missing places with glue paint.
Step Three: Sanding
After gluing the porcelain, be sure to let the glued varnish in between dry completely. Only in this way can the next step of polishing be carried out.
When grinding, be sure to use water to grind, and not use too much force. Because the glaze of porcelain will be worn, if it is a purple sand pot, it is easier to wear and tear the luster.
After the first grinding, if there is no flat place to fill, you can repeat the process of the second and third steps until the best effect is achieved.
Step Four: Painting
You need to be very steady when painting. Try not to use the pen repeatedly, as it is easy to have fine lines on the paint surface.
The lacquer here should be the red lacquer of professional Kintsugi.
Step Five: Brushing with gold powder
The gold powder must be applied when the paint is half dry. Also, keep your hands steady, try to point in one direction, and the tip of the pen should be soft, otherwise, there will be small spots.
To test the semi-dry method of the paint surface, you can breathe a sigh of relief. If the paint surface does not produce a foggy surface, it means that the next process can be performed.
When applying gold powder, you need to wear a mask as much as possible, because the gold powder is very delicate, if you do not pay attention to heavy exhalation, it will be blown away.
After the gold painting is finished, put the repaired vintage teacup in a safe place for some time before reusing them.
Sometimes the repair of a damaged vintage teacup is itself an art of creating beauty, and the process of repairing a broken vintage teacup is also a kind of creation. Beautiful vintage teacups make you feel better when you use them.
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