Kintsugi with epoxy and mica.
Something you made broke. You can glue it and hope nobody looks too closely, or you can run a gold seam through the break and make it the best part of the pot. This is the second one, done with two-part epoxy and a jar of mica powder.
Everything below is the epoxy version of the technique. It is fast, it is forgiving, it costs about ten dollars, and it is not the same thing as traditional kintsugi. We are going to be straight with you about that difference, and about what you can and cannot do with the pot afterward.
- Two-part epoxy
- Mica powder
- One evening, plus a cure
- Decorative repair
Gold seam, two-part epoxy, one evening.
You are gluing the pot back together with epoxy that has mica powder stirred into it, so the glue line itself is the gold. It is not traditional kintsugi, which uses tree lacquer and real metal and takes months, and it is worth saying so out loud when you show somebody the pot.
The one decision: mica weakens the bond, so if the piece has to be strong, glue it clean first and paint the gold line on afterward instead. For a pot that is going to sit on a shelf, mix it all together and go.
What to grab
- Two-part epoxy. Five-minute for a simple break, thirty-minute if it is in more than four pieces.
- Mica powder in whatever color you want the seam to be.
- Nitrile gloves, foil to mix on, toothpicks, tape.
- A fresh razor blade, 400 and 600 grit wet or dry paper.
- Isopropyl alcohol and swabs, plus a bowl of rice to cradle the pot.
We keep the 5-minute epoxy on the shelf at $9.50. Mica powder we do not carry, so bring your own jar.
Six moves.
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Dry fit the whole pot before you open anything
Photograph the shards, number the backs in pencil, and tape the pot together with no glue. Check that the last piece can actually drop in from a clear direction. Glue two shards in the wrong order and the final piece physically will not fit, and that is not fixable.
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Clean the edges and build tape hinges
Brush the broken edges dry, wipe with alcohol, let it flash off. Do not soak the pot; raw clay holds water for days and epoxy will not bond to a damp break. Then run tape across each closed joint on the outside so it opens like a book and closes back into alignment.
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Mix small, epoxy first, mica second
Equal beads of resin and hardener on foil. Stir a full thirty seconds and scrape the sides. Then fold in mica, starting near one part to three, until it stops flowing like honey. Past that it is filler, not glue.
Mix enough for one or two joints only. Five-minute epoxy gives you about three usable minutes, and a big puddle cures faster than a small one because it holds its own heat.
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Thin film on one edge, then close and hold
A toothpick, not a stick, and only one of the two mating edges. Press it closed and hold three to five minutes. While you hold, run a fingernail across the seam from both sides. You can feel a step you cannot see, and now is the only time you can fix it.
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Pare the squeeze-out while it is rubbery
Eight to twenty minutes in, the bead along the seam goes firm but still cuts like a gummy candy. Lay a razor almost flat to the glaze and take it off in one stroke. Earlier and you smear it, later and it is glass.
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Cradle it in rice and leave it a full day
Set the pot so gravity holds the joints closed rather than pulling them open, and do not touch it again. Set is minutes, cured is twenty-four hours, and a joint sanded green will show a hairline later.
Have this playing while you work
The whole method at a normal speed on a real broken piece. Watch how much mica goes in relative to the epoxy; seeing the color arrive is more useful than any ratio, because it depends entirely on your jar.
Then sand it, because that is the whole difference.
A seam that feels smooth under a fingertip reads as intentional. A seam with a ridge on it reads as broken and glued. This is the step people skip and it is the one doing most of the work.
- 400 grit used wet, then 600. Work along the seam, never across it.
- Stay on the epoxy. Sanding the glaze either side leaves a matte halo that catches the light forever.
- Sanding dulls the gold. That is expected. Buff it back with dry mica on a soft brush, or brush on a thin second coat of mica-heavy epoxy.
- Check it with your eyes shut. Fingertips find ridges that eyes walk past.
Six minutes on the part nobody films
The title is not a gimmick. Watch the before and after. If your first attempt came out lumpy, this is the video that fixes your second one.
An epoxy repair is a display repair.
General purpose epoxy is not a food-contact material, heat softens it, and under that gold line is bare unglazed clay that anything getting past the seam soaks straight into. A rim repair also sits exactly where you drink.
- Display, dry goods, or a planter with a separate liner inside it.
- Hand wash cool and gentle. No dishwasher, no microwave, no oven, no boiling water, no long soaks.
- Never put a repaired piece back in a kiln. Our glaze firings run to cone 5½. Epoxy does not soften at that temperature, it decomposes, and it takes the shelf and the rest of the load with it.
- If the piece broke before it was glazed, stop and ask us first. Bisque and greenware both have repair routes that keep the piece firable, and epoxy closes all of them permanently.
What actually goes wrong.
- It went hard before you finished. Five minutes is not five minutes of working time. Mix per joint, not per pot.
- The line is fat and lumpy. Too much epoxy, or you missed the rubbery window for the razor. Sand it flat at 400 wet and paint a fresh gold line over the top.
- The pieces do not line up. Wrong glue order, or a flake missing from an edge. This is the one you cannot fix afterward, which is why step one is dry fitting.
Two house rules.
- Work at a table, not at a wheel, and cover it. Epoxy on a shared table is somebody else’s problem an hour later and it does not wipe off once it has grabbed.
- Nothing with epoxy on it goes in a sink or a reclaim bucket. Uncured epoxy is a real plumbing problem and mica contaminates everybody’s clay. Scrape the foil into the trash and clean tools with alcohol and a paper towel.
Why this page makes you read and watch.
There are two things happening in a kintsugi repair, and no single format carries both of them.
Video is the only honest way to show timing and pressure. Nobody can write down what “rubbery enough to slice” looks like, or how hard to squeeze two shards together without sliding them out of line. You have to watch a pair of hands do it. Ten seconds of somebody scraping squeeze-out at exactly the right moment teaches more than a paragraph ever will.
Text is the only thing you can glance at with epoxy on your gloves. It holds the order of operations, the ratios and the numbers, and it lets you jump back three steps without scrubbing a timeline. It also survives being printed and taped to the table, which a video does not.
So read the steps first and build the map. Then watch somebody run it and let the motion fill in. Doing it the other way around is how most people end up standing at a table with mixed epoxy going hard in front of them, trying to remember which piece went in first.
This is not traditional kintsugi, and that is fine.
Both things are worth knowing about, and mixing them up is how people end up disappointed with a perfectly good repair.
Traditional kintsugi
The joint is made with urushi, a lacquer tapped from a tree, and it is finished with real powdered gold or silver. It cures in a humid box over weeks, in many thin coats, and a single bowl can take months from break to finish.
Urushi is also a skin irritant while it is wet, related to poison ivy, and learning to handle it is a real part of learning the craft. Done properly, the finished joint is stable, durable and considered safe to eat from.
What we are doing
The joint is two-part epoxy. The color is mica powder, a mineral pigment that reads as metal because of how it reflects light. It is done in an evening and cured by the next day.
It is honest to call it epoxy kintsugi, kintsugi-style, or a gold-effect repair. It is not honest to call it kintsugi and leave it there, especially if the piece is a gift or something you are selling. Say what is in the seam.
Mica is not gold. It is a mineral flake, usually coated with titanium dioxide or iron oxide, and the color you see is interference from the coating rather than metal. That is why cheap mica looks brassy and good mica looks warm, and why the same jar can look completely different over a dark seam than a light one. Test your color on a scrap shard before you commit it to the pot.
An epoxy repair is a display repair.
We would rather tell you this at the top than have you find out with a mug of coffee in your hand. A pot repaired with hardware store epoxy should not go back into food service, and there is no trick on this page that changes that.
Why not
- General purpose epoxy is not sold as a food-contact material. The products that carry that certification are a different category with different testing behind them.
- Heat softens it. A dishwasher cycle runs hotter than most household epoxy stays rigid, and a softened seam can creep, cloud or let go.
- The break itself is bare clay. Under that gold line is unglazed body with no glass over it, so anything that gets past the epoxy is soaking into raw clay you cannot clean.
- Seams sit exactly where you drink. A rim repair puts the joint against a lip every single time.
What it is still perfect for
- Anything that lives on a shelf and gets looked at.
- Vases and planters using a separate liner or a plastic nursery pot inside.
- Dry goods. Keys, rings, hair ties, paperclips, coffee beans in a bag.
- A piece with meaning behind it that you were never going to throw away.
Hand wash cool and gentle if it needs cleaning. No dishwasher, no microwave, no oven, no boiling water, no long soaks.
Somebody actually chasing the food-safe version
Alex works through why the standard epoxy answer falls short for anything you eat from, and what it takes to get closer. Worth watching before you decide a repaired bowl is going back in the cupboard rather than onto a shelf.
The short answer, if you want a golden seam you can genuinely eat off, is that you are looking at traditional urushi and real metal, not a tube from the hardware aisle.
What you actually need.
The list is short and most of it is already in a drawer at home. The two things worth thinking about are the epoxy and the mica.
Two-part epoxy
The five-minute kind is the easiest to start with and it is what we keep in the studio. It gives you roughly three usable minutes once it is mixed, which is plenty for a clean break in two or three pieces.
If your pot is in six pieces, or the break is long and fussy, buy a thirty-minute epoxy instead. More working time, and it self-levels better, which gives a cleaner line.
Mica powder
Craft or cosmetic grade, in whatever color you want the seam to be. Gold is traditional. Bronze reads warmer, champagne reads softer, and copper looks extremely good against a dark glaze.
A tiny jar lasts through a dozen pots. Bring your own; we do not stock it.
Everything else
- Nitrile gloves
- Foil, wax paper or a silicone mat to mix on
- Toothpicks and a craft stick
- Painter’s tape or masking tape
- A fresh razor blade or craft knife
- 400 and 600 grit wet or dry sandpaper
- Isopropyl alcohol and cotton swabs
- A bowl of rice or a folded towel to cradle the pot while it cures
We sell the epoxy. The Gorilla 5-Minute Epoxy we keep for kintsugi is $9.50, and it is on the shelf with the rest of the helpful pottery items. Mica powder, sandpaper and tape are on you.
There are two methods, and one question decides it.
Are you gluing this to be strong, or gluing it to look right? Mica in the epoxy weakens the bond, because past a certain point pigment stops being glue and starts being filler.
Method A. Mix it in.
The mica goes into the epoxy and the glue itself is gold. One pass, one session, done.
Choose this when the break is clean, the piece is in two to four parts, and the pot is going to sit on a shelf and be admired rather than carry weight.
The line is only as wide as your seam gap, so a tight break gives a thin, delicate line whether you wanted one or not.
Method B. Glue, then gild.
Glue with clean epoxy, let it cure hard, then paint a mica line over the top of the seam.
Choose this when the piece has to hold together properly, when there are a lot of pieces, or when you want a bold line that reads from across the room.
Two sessions instead of one, and you get to decide the width of the line rather than letting the break decide it.
Watch this one first
Lakeside Pottery is a professional restoration studio, and this is the clearest side by side of the real gold route and the gold-effect route we have found. It shows you what each one actually looks like when it is finished, which is the part still photos always flatter.
If you only have nine minutes before you start, spend them here. It will settle which method you want faster than reading about it will.
Dry fit the whole thing before you open the epoxy.
Almost every ruined kintsugi repair is decided here, before a drop of glue is mixed. Two failures, both permanent, both entirely avoidable.
Locking yourself out
Glue two shards together in the wrong order and the last piece will not physically go in. It needs to slide in from a direction that is now walled off on both sides, and no amount of pressure changes geometry.
Find the order dry. Build the pot with no glue, note which piece goes in last, and check that it can drop in from one clear direction with nothing in the way.
Creeping misalignment
Each joint that sits a hair proud pushes the next one further out. By the fourth piece the last gap is a wedge and nothing lines up. It is called stacking error and it is why restorers glue sub-assemblies first.
Run a fingernail across every dry joint. You can feel a step you cannot see, and a step you can feel now is a step you will be sanding forever later.
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Photograph the pieces laid out
Take one picture of the shards arranged the way they go together. When you are three joints in and confused, that photo is the only thing that will save you.
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Number the backs in pencil
Write the assembly order on the inside of each shard in soft pencil. It wipes off later with alcohol, and it means you are not solving the puzzle twice.
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Assemble it dry with tape
Hold the whole pot together with tape and look at it. Any gap you see now is a gap you will have in gold later, so decide now whether you are filling it or living with it.
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Clean every broken edge
Dust and old grit stop epoxy from wetting the surface, and a joint that does not wet does not hold. Brush the edges dry, then wipe with isopropyl alcohol on a swab and let it flash off.
Do not soak a broken pot in water. Raw clay edges drink it and hold it for days, and epoxy will not bond to a damp break.
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Build tape hinges
Run a strip of tape across the outside of a joint while the pieces are closed, then open the joint like a book. The tape holds the alignment, you glue the exposed edge, and closing it puts the piece back exactly where it was.
Alignment, taught by somebody who does it for a living
This is aimed at invisible repair rather than kintsugi, which makes it the best possible alignment lesson: when the goal is for the joint to disappear, every millimetre of misalignment shows. Steal the technique and then run gold down the seam instead of hiding it.
Pay attention to how little adhesive goes on the edge. That is the single most common beginner mistake and it is very visible here.
Mixing the mica straight into the epoxy.
One pass, one evening. The glue and the gold are the same material, so the seam is exactly as wide as the break decided it should be.
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Mix the epoxy first, on its own
Equal beads of resin and hardener on foil. Stir for a full thirty seconds and scrape the sides in as you go. Under-stirred epoxy cures soft and cloudy, and no amount of mica hides that.
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Fold the mica in second
Start at roughly one part mica to three parts mixed epoxy and judge it by eye. More mica means a brighter, more opaque line and a weaker joint. Less means a translucent line that reads as glue with a shimmer in it.
Stop adding mica the moment the mixture stops flowing like honey and starts behaving like paste. That is the point where it has become filler instead of adhesive.
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Apply thin, to one edge only
A toothpick, not a stick. Run a thin film along one of the two mating edges. Coating both edges doubles what has to squeeze out, and squeeze-out is what turns a delicate gold line into a fat smeared one.
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Close it and hold
Press the joint closed and hold it for three to five minutes with a five-minute epoxy. While you are holding, run a fingernail across the seam from both sides. If you feel a step, you have until the epoxy grabs to nudge it flat, and not one second longer.
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Cradle it and walk away
Set the pot into a bowl of dry rice or a folded towel so gravity holds the joint closed rather than pulling it open. Leave it alone. Five-minute epoxy is set in minutes but nowhere near cured.
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Slice the squeeze-out at the rubbery stage
Somewhere between eight and twenty minutes the bead along the seam goes firm but still cuts like a gummy candy. That is the window. Lay a razor almost flat against the glaze and pare the bead off in one stroke.
Too early and you smear it into the glaze. Too late and it is glass, and now you are sanding.
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Give it twenty-four hours before anything else
Full cure is a day, not five minutes. Sanding or handling a green joint is how a repair that looked perfect on Tuesday has a hairline in it on Thursday.
The whole mix-in method, unhurried
Fourteen minutes covering mixing, tinting, gluing and cleanup on a real broken piece, at a normal speed rather than a montage. This is the one to have playing on a phone beside you the first time.
Watch how much mica goes in relative to the epoxy. Seeing the color arrive is far more useful than any ratio we can write down, because it depends entirely on your jar.
The glue-up itself.
Everything before this is preparation and everything after is cleanup. The joint is decided in about three minutes.
Three and a half minutes, beautifully shot
Clara Graziolino working through a bowl with very clear hands and very clear camera work. If the longer tutorials feel like a lot, watch this one twice instead. It is the same information at a quarter of the length.
The taping and the holding are the parts to steal.
Mix small. The most common wreck of an evening is mixing a puddle, getting two joints done, and watching the rest go hard on the foil. Epoxy also generates its own heat as it cures, so a big puddle actually sets faster than a small one. Mix enough for one or two joints, then mix again.
Glue it clean, then paint the gold on top.
Slower, stronger, and much more controllable. This is the route that looks the most like traditional kintsugi, because traditional kintsugi also builds the joint first and gilds it afterward.
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Glue with clean epoxy
No mica, or a whisper of it just so you can see where the seam is. All the same rules apply: thin film, one edge, hold, cradle, pare the squeeze-out at the rubbery stage.
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Cure hard, then flatten the seam
Twenty-four hours, then knock any remaining ridge back with 400 grit used wet. You want the seam flush with the glaze before you put anything gold on it, because a gold line over a bump reads as a mistake and a gold line over a flat surface reads as a decision.
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Mask to the width you want
Run tape down both sides of the seam, leaving whatever gap you want the finished line to be. Somewhere between one and three millimetres looks right on most pots. Press the tape edges down hard or the line will bleed under them.
Masking is optional. Freehand looks more alive and more like the traditional article, and it is also much less forgiving. Do one pot each way before you decide which you are.
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Mix a heavy, brushable gold
Fresh epoxy loaded with a lot more mica than you used for gluing. It does not need to hold anything together now, so you can push the pigment until it is genuinely opaque.
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Paint it, then pull the tape while it is tacky
A small brush or a toothpick, one confident pass down the seam. Then take the tape off before the epoxy hardens, not after. Tape pulled off cured epoxy tears the edge of your line off with it.
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Cure, then second-coat any dull patches
A thin line often dries patchy where the epoxy soaked in. A second pass over just those spots evens it out, and nobody can tell afterward.
The gold-effect route from start to finish
Lakeside again, this time following one vessel all the way through the alternative-to-real-gold process. Under six minutes and it shows the finished piece properly lit, which is the honest test of whether a mica line actually looks like anything.
Notice how flat the seam is before any gold goes near it. That is the whole trick.
The difference between good and homemade is sanding.
This is the step almost everybody skips, and it is the one doing most of the work. A repair that feels smooth under a fingertip reads as intentional. A repair with a ridge on it reads as broken and glued.
- Wait the full cure. Sanding uncured epoxy gums the paper and drags the seam sideways.
- 400 grit wet, then 600. Water keeps the dust down and stops the paper loading up. Work along the seam, never across it.
- Keep the paper on the epoxy. Sand the glaze either side and you will scuff a matte halo around your gold line that catches the light forever.
- Sanding will dull the gold. This is expected and it is fixable. A light second pass of mica-loaded epoxy, or a dry brush loaded with mica buffed along the line, brings the shine straight back.
- Check it by feel with your eyes shut. Fingertips find ridges that eyes walk straight past.
Six minutes on the part nobody films
The title is not a gimmick. This really is a video about sanding, and it is the reason we put it on the page. Watch the before and after and you will understand why we keep going on about it.
If your first attempt looked lumpy, this is the video that fixes your second one.
Chips, gaps, and the shard that went under the fridge.
A missing piece is not the end of the pot. It is just a second material and one extra day.
Small chips
Two-part epoxy putty, the kind you knead together into a grey worm, is the right tool. Press it into the chip slightly proud, let it go off, then file and sand it flush.
Once it is flush you have a choice: paint gold only around the boundary so the patch reads as a repair, or gold the whole patch so it reads as a deliberate gold inlay. Both look good. The second one is bolder and hides a rougher patch.
Bigger missing wedges
Tape a dam across the inside of the hole, then build the fill up in thin layers from the outside. Thin layers matter: a deep pour of epoxy heats itself as it cures, and hot epoxy yellows, bubbles and shrinks away from the edges.
Never fill a structural gap with mica-heavy epoxy. Fill it with something that is actually strong, then put the gold on the surface where it belongs.
Epoxy putty on a chipped edge
The cleanest demonstration of working putty into a chip and sanding it back that we know of. Watch how much shaping happens while the putty is still soft, which is far easier than filing a cured lump into shape afterward.
Rebuilding a whole missing segment
For the ambitious case, where a real chunk of the pot is gone. Two approaches in under four minutes, from a studio that does this professionally, and a good reality check on how much work a large missing section actually is before you commit an evening to it.
The whole thing, on one screen.
This is the part to leave up on a phone while your hands are busy. Nothing here is new; it is everything above with the explanations taken out.
Before you mix anything
Ten minutes here saves the whole pot.
- Photograph the shards laid out.
- Number the backs in pencil.
- Dry fit the whole pot with tape.
- Confirm the last piece can actually drop in.
- Brush the edges, wipe with alcohol, let it flash off.
- Build your tape hinges.
- Gloves on, foil down, rice bowl ready.
Gluing
Roughly three usable minutes per batch.
- Equal beads of resin and hardener.
- Stir thirty seconds, scrape the sides.
- Fold in mica, about one part to three.
- Stop when it stops flowing like honey.
- Thin film, one edge only, on a toothpick.
- Close, hold three to five minutes.
- Fingernail across the seam. Feel for a step.
- Cradle in rice. Mix again for the next joint.
Cleanup and finish
The rubbery window is eight to twenty minutes.
- Razor almost flat, pare the bead in one stroke.
- Wait twenty-four hours before anything else.
- 400 grit wet, then 600, along the seam.
- Stay on the epoxy, off the glaze.
- Buff the shine back with dry mica on a brush.
- Second coat any dull patches.
Afterward
The rules that keep it looking like this.
- Display, dry goods or a lined planter.
- Hand wash cool. No dishwasher.
- No microwave, no oven, no boiling water.
- Never back into a kiln. Not once.
- Call it epoxy kintsugi when you talk about it.
Eight ways this goes sideways.
Every one of these has a cause you can name, which means every one of them is avoidable on the next pot.
| What you are looking at | Why | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| The line is brown, not gold | Not enough mica, or the epoxy yellowed as it cured and swamped a thin pigment load. | Paint a second, heavier mica pass over the top. You do not have to live with the first one. |
| The line is fat and lumpy | Too much epoxy on the edge, or the squeeze-out was left past the rubbery window. | Sand it flat at 400 wet, then re-gild. Next time, thinner film and one edge only. |
| The pieces do not line up | Glued in the wrong order, or a tiny flake is missing from an edge and the joint is riding on it. | This one you cannot fix afterward. It is why dry fitting is the longest section on this page. |
| It went hard before you finished | Five-minute epoxy is not a five-minute working time, and a big puddle cures faster than a small one because it holds its own heat. | Mix per joint, not per pot. Or move to a thirty-minute epoxy. |
| Cloudy, soft or tacky after a day | Off-ratio or under-stirred. Both produce the same result and neither improves with more time. | Scrape it out, clean with alcohol, mix again with a full thirty-second stir. |
| Fingerprints set into the gold | Bare hands, or checking the joint while it was still soft. | Gloves, and leave it alone once it is cradled. Sand and re-gild the print. |
| The gold went dull after sanding | Working as intended. You have abraded the reflective flakes at the surface. | Dry mica on a soft brush, buffed along the line, or a thin second coat. |
| A joint failed weeks later | Too much mica in a structural joint, a damp or dusty edge, or the piece got hot somewhere it should not have. | Take that joint apart if you can, clean it back, and glue it clean using Method B. |
A potter doing it on her own work.
Every other video here is instructional. This one is somebody fixing a piece she made and cared about, at real speed, which is a different and useful thing to watch.
Including the bits that did not go to plan
Seventeen minutes with the mistakes left in, which is exactly why it is here. You get to see what a joint looks like when it is not perfect, and what she does about it, instead of only ever seeing the take that worked.
Save this one for after your first attempt. It will make a lot more sense once you have your own lumpy seam to compare it to.
Four rules for kintsugi in the studio.
Epoxy is the one material we use that does not belong anywhere near clay, water or a kiln, so it gets its own short list.
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Never, ever put a repaired piece back in a kiln
This is the one that matters. Epoxy is a plastic. Our glaze firings run to cone 5½, which means it does not soften, it decomposes, and it takes the shelf, the elements and whatever else is in the load with it. Once a piece has epoxy in it, its firing life is over.
If a broken piece has never been glazed, you still have options. Tell us before you reach for the glue.
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Work at a table, not at a wheel
Cover it. Epoxy on a shared table is somebody else’s problem an hour later, and it does not wipe off once it has grabbed. Foil or a scrap of newsprint is enough.
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Nothing epoxy goes in a sink or a reclaim bucket
Uncured epoxy in a drain is a genuine plumbing problem, and mica in a reclaim bucket contaminates everybody’s clay. Scrape the foil into the trash, and clean tools with alcohol and a paper towel that also goes in the trash. Everything else about cleaning up still applies.
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We stock the epoxy, you bring the mica
The Gorilla 5-Minute Epoxy is $9.50 on the shelf. Mica powder we do not carry, so pick your color at home and bring the jar.
The ones we get asked.
Can I use super glue instead of epoxy?
You can glue with it, but you cannot color it. Cyanoacrylate sets far too fast to mix pigment into and it goes on far too thin to carry a visible line. It is also brittle and it yellows badly over a couple of years. If super glue is what you have, use it to hold the pot and then paint your gold line on top, which is Method B anyway.
How much mica per batch of epoxy?
Start around one part mica to three parts mixed epoxy and adjust by eye, because jars vary enormously in how strong they are. The reliable signal is texture rather than a ratio: keep adding until it stops flowing like honey, then stop. Past that it is filler, not glue.
For a Method B gold line, where nothing is being held together, you can go much heavier and should.
Can I drink out of it afterward?
We would not. General purpose epoxy is not a food-contact material, the seam sits on bare clay under the gold, and a rim repair puts the joint against your mouth every time. Treat a repaired piece as display, dry storage, or a planter with a liner in it.
If a food-safe golden seam is genuinely the goal, that is traditional urushi and real metal, and it is a much bigger project.
My pot broke before it was glazed. Same process?
No, and please do not epoxy it. Greenware and bisque both have real repair routes that keep the piece firable, and once epoxy is in it those routes are gone forever. Ask us first.
Bisque can often be joined and refired. Greenware can frequently be saved with score and slip or a commercial mender if it is caught early.
Does it have to be gold?
Not remotely. Gold is traditional, silver and platinum have their own long history in the same craft, and mica comes in every color there is. Copper against a dark glaze is one of the best looking versions of this we have seen. So is a deliberately clashing color on a plain white pot.
Test on a scrap shard first. The same jar looks completely different over a dark break than a light one.
What if it broke into fifteen pieces?
Then you glue sub-assemblies. Join two or three shards into a unit, cure it fully, join the next unit, and only bring the units together at the end. Trying to run fifteen wet joints at once is how stacking error turns the last gap into a wedge.
Move to a thirty-minute epoxy too. Three usable minutes is not enough working time for a puzzle that size.
Can I fix somebody else’s antique this way?
Think hard before you do. Epoxy is not reversible, and reversibility is the first principle of conservation, because it leaves the next person options you did not think of. For anything with real monetary or family value, a professional restorer is the right call rather than a tube from the hardware aisle.
Should I break a pot on purpose to try this?
Plenty of people do, and it is a completely reasonable way to learn. Wrap the piece in a towel, wear eye protection, and tap it with a hammer through the towel rather than dropping it, because a drop shatters and a tap breaks. Fewer, bigger pieces make a much better first project.
Nearby on the site.
The crack is the point.
Nobody does this to hide a break. A repair that hides a break is a different craft with different tools, and it is a good craft, and it is not this one.
Here you are drawing a bright line along the exact path the pot failed, so the first thing anybody notices is the thing that went wrong. That is worth remembering when your seam comes out slightly wobbly, or a shade browner than you wanted, or three millimetres wide where you meant one. It is a record of an accident. It is allowed to look like one.
So a wobbly line is not a failed repair. If you want the reasons behind every step above, both methods side by side, and what to do when a piece is missing entirely, switch to the Comprehensive Version at the top of the page.
Make the second one better. Then break something else.
Which version would you like to print?
Videos come out as a labeled box with the title and channel to search for, since paper does not play them.