Ho hum..........again....

Well, this winter is proving to be very long..........the snow came early and is being regularly topped up, but at least it has given me time to be in the studio working on a piece of art or two.

I was wondering what I was going to write about as I haven't posted for a little while, not because I don't want to, just haven't had too much to ramble about, so, I think we should carry on with restoring our china/ceramics.

Has everybody got them to a point where they are nice and dry? Good, then it's on to the next step. You will need a roll of magic tape, it's not as strong as Sellotape, and will come off easily. Right the next thing to do is to take your plate or cup or whatever it is, is it in several pieces?, if so, then you will need to just try placing the pieces back together to see how they fit. The reason for doing this is that you will work out the correct order when you come to glue them back together, nothing worse than finding you've locked a piece out.

This rather lovely plate came from the Maling factory and was in two pieces. "Easy!" you cry, but not necessarily. China has a memory and when it breaks it relaxes, so it is possible that the edges wouldn't meet exactly. It was not unknown for one end to be a perfect fit, and the other end to be stepped, that is, one end higher than the other, but there were ways of dealing with this which will be discussed further - if I haven't lost you already, I'd hate you all to be comatose.

So I think we will leave it at that for now, I will let you just tape the pieces together with no adhesive and then we will come back to it and see where we go from there.

This lovely teapot was interesting as I had to get the husband to help open the large area up so that I could get the piece back in as it refused to slide in and wouldn't fit. Heart in mouth moment I can assure you!!

It's actually quite fun to go through these processes again in theory, I'm amazed at how much I remember, but, I don't think I want to do it as a career anymore, although people still hand me things as they think it will take me five minutes to repair it. I really should look at what I have in the studio and clear it out. 

I have a total of four airbrushes and books of gold leaf. For those items that were gilded, gold leaf was supposed to be used to finish them, the only problem was that it didn't matter which colour you bought, it was never the right one and never matched, always to shiny compared to the gilding you were trying to match, and trying to use it was difficult. You didn't breathe as the gold leaf was likely to fold in half and it was a beast to cut pieces, then you had to create static by rubbing the paintbrush on your hair and then gently attracting the gold leaf to it, it practically leapt onto the hairs of the brush. In the meantime, you had put a very thin layer of glaze on the area of repair and then you would have to coax the gold leaf to leave the brush and sit exactly as needed. Don't try this at home, it's very frustrating and using gold leaf took years and years and years of practice to do properly. The usual way of gilding was to use Bronze powders, but we'll get there later.

I was working in the studio on a piece the other day, fabric that is, when I had the brilliant idea that I would use some of the gold leaf on my work, it's just sitting there doing nothing so why not? It took me three days to do not too much and I kept breathing at the wrong moment but at least it is on there. I will keep the finished piece for another post complete with gold leaf.............