Humpty Dumpty Time

Lately I undertook repairs on a group of painted Czech Easteregg shells. I couldn't resist the challenge. When I got the shells I wasn't even sure how many eggs would be made out of the pieces. This first picture shows them after the project was started. If you look carefully at the picture you might see how tiny strips of rolling paper are helping to build up the broken bits with the help of ordinary carpenter's glue.

The box of egg shards contained sheets of what looked like cigarette rolling paper. This sort of paper takes up moisture very easily but resists tearing. Oddly enough, it's inclusion in the box of shells inspired me to figure out this way of holding the shells together without filling them entirely with a backing material. 

Longer strips of the paper helped to bridge gaps and eventually supported a plaster in-fill. Then the eggs were in-painted within limits of the plaster fill. The white eggs were quite grey from dirt and were cleaned.

Here are the finished eggs - front and back. The yellow is an original intact yellow varnish. The white eggs have unusual scenes on one side. The egg on the left appears to depict a wedding between a rabbit and a cat (?) with an attendant rabbit horn player. The one on the left has a rabbit gardener in a pine grove going towards a building (church?) with a wheelbarrow.

Help Me Find a Restorer!

So you want to find a restorer. A good restorer.

The best way to do this is to ask a museum near you. Period.

First of all - there are not a lot of restorers. They don't have enormous advertising budgets, or luxury-rental studios. A good word-of-mouth reputation is their best billboard.

On the other hand - museums will know the ones who work commercially or in-house (and take on work in their ha-ha, spare time). They have a little list - really...and they have standards.

So call a local museum and ask for the conservation department. If they don't have a conservation department ask for the curator of the collection. Ask if they have any names of people who can repair/restore/conserve -  whatever you have.

Some china halls, jewellery stores, or silver plating studios will quite often offer a repair service. It could save you the leg-work of visiting the restorer yourself, because they do it. Restorers might have odd locations or hours - especially ones who work in a museum part-time; but stores have to stay open. Bear in mind that you'll be paying a lot more for their 'middleman fees' and you might have to wait a long time for the estimates or work. A store would have to collect enough jobs to make the trips back and forth viable and an extra person to do it.You also won't be able to talk to the restorer directly about what kind of repair is possible or what your expectations are. 

Building Rooster Tail Feathers

OK - here's the real goods...real ceramic restoration, up close and personal. The tailfeathers were missing on this rooster and this is how we made them.

Instead of using a metal armature which would be less firm when attached to the stumps of the feathers, I decided to make the armatures out of epoxy clay. The type of epoxy clay that I've been using for a while is from East Valley Supply in the USA - and when you hit this link and go to their website, you will see the same rooster pictures. Yes, they are my pictures...I thought I had something to crow about.

 

I love the consistency of this clay, the way it will hold detail, the set-up time and the carvablility after. Lovely stuff! - and I've tried them all. There's probably a little element of superstition about it as well - one tends to use the same things that have been successful in the past.

The tailfeathers are modelled and below are details of the painting. So, this is what we do for all that time we took. ;)

The Great Train Wreck

Not all things that come into a ceramic restoration studio are made of ceramic. Objects of wood, ivory, and small stone pieces come in and can be treated using the same techniques.

If an object belonging to another specialty in restoration comes into a studio they should be referred to a specialist. The treatment of canvas paintings or book/archival restoration, for instance, is very different and would require specialized set up, tools and expertise.

Here's an interesting artisasal lamp made of tree fungus, plant material and wood. The little tracks are made of bark strips. Now you're thinking - I have something like this in a box under the cottage with two inches of dust on it. Well, that is approximately the state that this lamp was in.

So first of all it had to be cleaned - Original colour was underneath, but totally obscured by dust and greasy dirt. Many elements of the 'terrain' were loose or off - stones, fungus and pine cones which were the 'trees'. Parts of the train and it's track had to be reassembled and attached to the lamp base.

The fun part was adding new material to complete the picture. Holes were left where plant material was lost in the past. The stones, pine cones and moss were cleverly chosen by the artisan to be porportional to the scene. 

A quick trip to the garden and some 'tall trees' were found - actually dried Siberian orostachys and astilbe plumes. The bright green paint on the pine cones is original. Because the colours overall had to be a little re-saturated due to drying over time, I gave the whole thing a light dusting of a matte crystal clear spray - one of the few times I would allow myself this luxury.

Cute - isn't it? 

Sasha - The Studio Cat

Sasha is a young Maine Coon who helps at the ceramic restoration studio. Her main job is to scratch down the sheets of bubble wrap from their hanger and snap bubbles with her claws.

Here she is seen taking up residence in a client's bag from an Italian bakery.

See more pictures of  Sasha at her Flickr set.

Why Restore Something?

Usually 'restoration' refers to the art of improving an object's appearance; but restorers also stabilize and strengthen objects, removing accumulations of dirt or repairs that may injure an object.

Stablility is important, even in an old repair, because it is movement between the pieces or replaced material which will wear away the precious original material. The more of the original that you have - the better chance of treating the object to preserve it for the future. 

The owner of an object might not always think in terms of heritage concerns - but are led by sentiment and/or guilt. They might only wish that regaining the original appearance of the object by any means is the priority.

A good restorer follows a code of ethics regarding the treatment of objects and their repair. They have to be a 'doctor' to the object which is their 'patient' - not the owner. This means that they might decide not to treat an object at all, if at this moment in time the old repair is stable. They may also decide that less paint is preferable to the original surface even if the repair is still seen or that old adhesive or in-fill must be removed and replaced.

Here's an interesting case that came through the studio in recent years. The picture you saw above is the finished product. When the object came in, it was extremely unstable and many of the old in-fills were crumbled away. There was a lot of movement between the pieces and alignment of them was quite questionable.

After all the pieces were freed from old adhesive and fill, it was found that the object was pieced together from shards of at least 2 - 3 ewers without almost no registration between many of the parts. The 'antique' was a 'marriage' of parts.

This was not from a museum which might have had other shards awaiting identification. It required a great deal of 'fudging' and in-fill to make the ewer look like a reasonable object.

As you can see from the top picture - we had a happy ending, after all - and this was accomplished without the addition of paint over any original material.