As Steuben becomes rarer with every year since the workshops have closed down, it becomes more and more worthwhile to save their pieces from oblivion. This elegant Steuben bowl was missing a 3” by 1” curved section from its rim, and would have been completely useless if not restored. We made a silicone rubber mold from a good section of the rim, and cast the missing piece with optical epoxy. While not an exact refractive match to the original lead ...
This is a Tiffany glass globe that broke out on the side. Although we had all the pieces, the simplicity of the final surface made the assembled pieces quite obvious. Even though the optical epoxy made the seams almost disappear, there was a slight surface expression of the seams. The next step was to mask off the surface to limit the extent of our coating. Then we airbrushed several clear coats – first to completely cover the seams, then to polish the ...
Working with a chip in a large, clear glass sculpture can evoke a creative solution. Any chip or deep scratch attracts attention to itself, and the whole piece completely loses its aesthetic impact, because it depends on clean simplicity. With such a pieces we have a variety of options, from filling the chips with an optical epoxy, to regrinding and polishing the scratched surface – to imperceptibly lowering the rim of a glass to remove a chip. In this case, however, there ...
This statue of St Joseph is larger than life. The neck had been broken and reglued, and the fingers of one hand were missing. As this is an outdoor sculpture, the approach was to make the repair strong and lightfast. We drilled a separate hole for each finger and installed 3/16” bolt stock for the fingers. This is quite strong and the threads make a good bond with the epoxy putty from which the fingers were sculpted. If the finished ...
This gilt-lacquered Buddha has a striking presence. It is Japanese, and actually a Buddhist Arhat, or saint – possibly a portrait of a revered abbot. It is approximately 2-1/2 feet tall and is make of several blocks of wood glued together. The damage resulted in part from these blocks shrinking at different rates, causing large offsets at the surface – thankfully mostly on the back. There were also patches of missing lacquer. The rest of the surface had been regilded more ...
These are not antiques but the awards for successful video games received by a company – Harmonix. A shelf collapsed, and the company thought it was worthwhile to have the awards back on display.
When gold is fired onto a glass or a ceramic it is vanishingly thin. One of the most common signs of wear on such pieces is work spots on unprotected edges and surfaces. Although we can restore such damage, it is a costly process and we not usually recommend it. In some cases, as this vase, the gold is used as an integral part of the design – and so it is important to restore it. In this case an ...
This outdoor lantern was one of a pair, made from sheet iron and copper, both in very similar condition: the door hinges, and most of the door frames, had rusted through. This eventually deposited the front glass panels on the ground in pieces. There was a good deal of rust and corrosion overall. They had been fixtures in the yard for so many years that they had been overlooked – and the new owners wanted them still looking like they ...
There were two small pieces broken from the rim of this vase – in the style of the Wedgwood fairyland pieces from the 1920’s. The challenge here was to recreate the purplish metallic lustre glaze that graded into a gold. We have five different ways to restore gold finishes – from various shades of gold leaf, to 23 karat Japanese gold powder, to shell gold, to finely powdered mica. Each of them is useful in different settings. This type of ...
This is a straightforward job for our studio, and a few examples need to be shown because such jobs are, in fact, the bulk of the work that we do: plates and other objects that may have no great value, but are a part of someone’s life – for whatever reason. In such cases we are often asked to put the pieces together, to fill whatever missing areas there may be, and to hand paint the damage. The effect of such ...