Kintsugi Piano Table
Anna got me the Lego piano kit for my birthday, and it is really cool. As well as looking fairly realistic, with the ability to open and close the various covers, it also has some clever mechanisms; The pedal makes the “dampers” rise and, if you hook up the smart app, it will “play” along with tunes (okay, random keys go up and down on a cam) and you can also set it up so that it will play notes when you hit keys (it detects that a key was hit–although it doesn’t care which key :-).
One of my favorite bits of the piano is actually the stool, which adjusts up and down on a scissor lift when you turn a knob on the side!
Anyway, I thought it would be cool to put it on display next to my real piano (fun fact: my playing skill between the Lego piano and the real piano is basically the same). I ordered a small table that would fit in the space, but when it showed up, the tabletop was broken:
I got a refund for the table, but they didn’t want to pay for the return shipping, so told us to just throw the table away–yes, the table was worth less than the shipping cost, which should tell you something about our furniture-purchasing priorities. We were quite irritated by the waste of this, but there wasn’t a lot we could do with a broken table. We talked about making a new tabletop, but it also seemed like we might be able to repair the existing one…
Just gluing it together would have looked fairly awful, but then we remembered about Kintsugi — a Japanese approach to repairs, where you emphasize the repair, to “celebrate the flaws and missteps of life.” The word actually means “to join with gold.”
And, when I say we remembered Kintsugi, I mean we. We were both looking at the table and said, basically in unison, “what about Kintsugi?” So a) we’re weird and b) I suspect that the two of us are meant to be together. It hasn’t quite been 30 years yet, though, so the jury’s still out.
We did some research and then we gave it a try. And by we, I mean Anna. Well, 96% Anna. I probably contributed a solid 4% to the project. So, yeah, mostly me.
You basically mix in “gold” powder into epoxy and attach the pieces. Then do a lot of sanding/buffing. I think it came out really nicely for a first try:
Ah, so _that_ (Kintsugi) is what I was doing when I mended our stoneware demijohn.
I thought I was just making a mess with epoxy resin.
K will be very pleased!
Any process is improved by finding a foreign word to describe it…
looks amazing!
Why does it not surprise me that you would chorus “Kintsugi?” And yeah, until you hit 42 years you can’t be confident. And then there was my mother, who would occasionally introduce my father as her “first husband”!