27 March 2008

Unbreaking the Buddha

There are two windows in my meditation room/ashram/dojo. The kittens like to get up into both of them, and, of course, managed to knock several items off of the side table in front of the north window. Two of them broke. I have since rearranged, so that there are no breakables near windows. They broke... more than a month ago. I was gluing the Buddha back together a piece at a time before I got sick, then gave up for a few weeks, and finally finished this week. The new tableau is in the corner, away from the kitties:




I honestly don't know if I got all the pieces to the Buddha. The glue filled up some of the room for the pieces, so that at the end I had an irregular piece, not quite rectangular, about half an inch by three quarters of an inch, that was too big to fit in the remaining empty spot. I wound up breaking it into smaller pieces to fill up the room as best I could. Then I filled in the remaining gaps with wood-fill. Incidentally, I discovered that the statue wasn't wood, as I had thought. It was plastic. As it was fairly cheap and came from Target, this wasn't a huge surprise...except that they did such a good job on the paint finish that it had never occurred to me that it might be plastic. Below is the patch-job:


And here is the undamaged side, for comparison:


So why fix it rather than replace it, since it was cheap? Sentimental reasons, I suppose. The statue has been there ever since I started my 108-days thing. Replacing it, even with a look-alike, wouldn't feel right. *shrugs* Besides, it was kind of fun trying to get it back together. And the other thing that broke was an onyx bowl. I think it was onyx. Some rock, anyway. It was much easier to fix. I had all but one piece, and that blank spot I filled with clear glue tonight. You can kinda see it, maybe a dime's diameter below the dime. It's up-side-down so that the glue can dry without sticking it to the little fair-trade bead-bowl it's sitting in.


3 comments:

John said...

is the dragonette in the first photo glazed whit or just unpainted? It looks pretty cool

Qalmlea said...

It's a white glaze, and it looks really good against the red walls (and not so good against white ones `/^ ). Here is a better picture, which came from a sort of Encyclopedia of Pena.

John said...

cool