Luel Restoration Studio

What to Do for China, Porcelain, and Ceramic Repair. If your ceramic piece has cracked, do not pick up the Super Glue!  Store brand glues may keep the pieces together, many glues cannot be removed and makes a seamless, beautiful ceramic repair impossible.Patch-up jobs will decrease the monetary value of item and decrease the beauty of a cherished piece.  If you have an heirloom, art piece, or valuable piece that needs china, porcelain, or ceramic repair, follow these simple steps:1. Collect all the pieces! Easier for a ceramic repair artist to work with original pieces and less expensive to create a new piece. 2. Consult with a professional ceramic repair shop about the restoration of your item. Most shops offer free estimates. 3. Package your item properly.  Luel Restoration Studios advises on proper shipping in evaluating your project.

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The place for China Repair and Porcelain Restoration

Last month a dealer of Chinese Porcelain met Luba at a Majolica Convention in Miami, Florida. He had recently purchased several pieces of Tenmoku Porcelain / Tenmoku China, and wanted to Luel Restoraiton Studio to restore a crack in one of the bowls. It was a long hairline crack that ran across the entire bowl. Antique China Repair is one of Luba’s many fortes  and she could have restored the bowl beautifully and invisibly. The problem was that the bowl wasn’t Tenmoku and she told the dealer that.  We have worked with Temmoku pottery in the past at the studio and have studied its history and design.  Tenmoku is a glaze. A long firing process foreces the migrating iron to form surface crystals that look like oil spots. Tenmoku (also spelled Temmoku) is a Japanese name for this type of process and glaze. The Chinese name is Chien Yao. In English it’s referred to as Heaven’s Eye.  The dealer’s bowl had painted stains glazed over. It was a beautiful piece but it wasn’t Tenmoku.  Ultimately, the dealer decided against restoring the bowl, but he was grateful to Luba for pointing his mistake out to him. He contacted Luel Restoration studio a couple of weeks later and shipped two Staffordshire items for restoration.  Below is a sample image of a Tenmoku Pottery.

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If your grandmother is throwing out a chipped piece of china stored for years in her china hutch, ask her, beg her, to let you take the piece.  With proper china restoration from an experienced and talented restoration artist, the platter can be a beautiful piece for displaying on a prominent shelf or in your own china hutch.

There are a few artists, such as Luba Sokolina, who specialize in china repair and porcelain restoration.  The techniques she uses are amazing resulting in invisible repair lines and museum quality restoration.

It should be noted that these repairs do not usually allow the owners to use the plates for meals. They are used for display/decorative purposes only. 

Perhaps that china platter was a gift from grandmother’s wedding so many years ago or it was the one bit of luxury she cherished, but knowing the history can make the piece so much more meaningful.  Having a professional restoration is definitely recommended for exceptional results.

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Centuries ago, when China was ruled by Emperors, a Chinese man lived in a beautiful pagoda under an apple tree to the right side of the bridge.   It is over this bridge that the willow tree drapes.   The Chinese man, Tso Ling, was the father of a beautiful daughter, Kwang-se.  It is this daughter who was the promised bride of a wealthy and old merchant.

But the story is complicated by the girl falling in love with Chang, the father’s clerk. The girl and young man eloped across the sea to the island cottages.  The father followed them and caught them.  He was about to have them killed when the gods saved the two by transforming them into a pair of turtle doves.  These are seen flying together at the top of the design.

The Blue Willow present form was originally designed in the United Kingdom in 1790 Caughley Pottery Works in Shropshire.

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Greetings, 

A lot of our clients ask us about the ceramic and porcelain restoration classes that Luba conducts a few times a year, depending on Luba’s availability and on how many people sign up. A man from Chicago called yesterday and wanted to buy a How-To-Restore Ceramic and Porcelain Items videotape that he’d heard Luel Restoration Studio was selling. 

Allow me to clarify the myth – we don’t sell any video tapes, books, manuals, etc. Luba offers one-on-one, face-to-face sessions for up to 10 people per session. The lessons are strictly hands-on (no lesson plans, brochures, etc.). The student should be willing to devote approximately three hours, two to three times a week for up to two months – and that’s just to learn the basics.  Ceramic and porcelain repair is a craft and an art. We can teach you the craft, the rest is up to you and your muse.

There are many websites out in cyberspace “guaranteeing” to make a professional ceramic restorer out of you if you buy their tape or their book. We don’t make such promises. Like learning how to play the violin, or drive a car, or speak another language,  professional repair and restoration requires time, patience, and yes… talent.  Not everyone will play Carnegie Hall, but if you’re willing to put in the hours and the effort, magic will happen.

You will learn how to glue and fuse the broken pieces, sculpt the missing fragments, fill in the cracks, match and replicate the color and design/pattern, airbrush, and glaze to seal in the color and add gloss (if necessary).

Here’s a list of the types of restorations we specialize in and teach:

China Repair,

Porcelain Repair

Ceramic Restoration

Majolica Repair

Clay Restoration

Glass Repair

Doll Restoration

Earthenware Restoration

Bisque Repair

So if you’re interested in learning how to restore china that got damaged in shipping, or repair that porcelain or clay vase you inherited from your grandmother, or save and restore your ceramic bowl that’s worth a lot of money,  contact us any time at luba@luelstudio.com or by phone at 347-673-8831.We can also save you the time and money by doing the restoration for you.

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China, originally referred to a ceramic dinnerware coming out of the country of China, was particularly fine and exceptionally white.

China is a ceramic product but of a very fine quality and it should more accurately be called porcelain. The Chinese perfected porcelain by using kaolin, a white clay, mixing it with china stone and firing it at high temperatures. That was in the 10th century and it took another 800 years before true porcelain was developed in Europe.

Early Europeans tried to duplicate Chinese porcelain and the results were soft paste porcelain made with clays and silicates. In the 1700s, a German pottery company successfully produced bone china, which is similar to true porcelain, by mixing calcified bones, clay, and feldspar. Bone china is extremely strong and easy to make, and it became very popular among the English speaking nations. However, true porcelain is preferred in much of Europe and Asia.

True porcelain is a hard, fine-grained, sonorous, nonporous, and usually translucent and white ceramic ware that consists essentially of kaolin, quartz, and a feldspathic rock and is fired at a high temperature —called also hard-paste porcelain.

In China, porcelain is defined as pottery that is resonant when struck; in the West it is a material that is translucent when held to the light. Neither definition is totally correct. Some heavily potted porcelains are opaque, while some thinly potted stonewares are sometimes translucent.

Porcelain Repair 

The trick in porcelain repair (china repair) is to be able to match the surface texture in such a way that it doesn’t differ from the original when held up to the light or gently struck. Airbrushing and glazing are two of the most important step in restoring china (or true porcelain), soft-paste porcelain and bone china. Glaze, a glass-like substance originally used to seal a porous pottery body is used solely for decoration on true(hard-paste) porcelain. A lot of inexperienced china restorers use too much glaze to cover their sculpting mistakes, thereby rendering the restored part more opaque than what it was originally.

Airbrushing the matched and replicated design in cold restoration requires painstaking effort. Painted decorations are executed over the fired glaze. Because painting under the glaze must be fired at the same high temperatures as the body, many colors and designs would get distorted or simply “fire away”. That’s why underglaze painting is limited to the extremely stable and reliable cobalt blue, which is found in most Chinese blue-and-white wares. These days most porcelain colors and designs are painted over the glaze and they are not as vivid and precise as the underglaze designs; therefore a restorer involved in porcelain repair and restoration is required to be very precise and patient.

For more on china restoration and porcelain repair, and to see the before and after photos of the two-inch Ming Dynasty wine cup Luba just restored for a New York City collector, click here…

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Meissen Porcelain is created by Germany’s premier manufacturer of fine porcelain tableware, giftware and hand-painted porcelain. They have been in continuous operation since 1710 in the town of Meissen, fifteen miles northwest of Dresden, Germany.

Today, they produce more than 175,000 items from about 200,000 different forms – some forms dating back to the early eighteenth century.

Meissen Porcelain is sold worldwide, and Meissen Porcelain Incorporated, located in New York, distributes throughout the North American market.

The focus of Meissen porcelain production has always been quality. Meissen is dedicated to handcrafting and to a balance of tradition and innovation.

At Luel Restoration Studio, we have extensive experience in Meissen porcelain repair.  We combine the skills of craftsmanship with advanced technology to bring damaged porcelain back to life.

We have the great artistic skill and experience needed to bring your heirloom or special porcelain piece back to it former beauty and value, making cracks and chips invisible to the eye.  Often times, we create missing pieces to the amazement of the porcelain owner.  Sculpting by hand and flawless color match painting are our specialties.

Contact Luel Restoration Studio for your porcelain restoration.

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In general, conservation is usually the work antiquities of museums and archaeological digs. Conservators do work on repairs, but they primarily focus on documentation, research, and repair methodology that does not obviously alter the item’s appearance.

Ceramic restoration can employ all of the above, but the emphasis is on making invisible repairs. Luel Restoration Studio offers the highest quality invisible and museum-style ceramic repair, restoration and conservation.

Restoration involves sculpting missing parts and retouching. However, an experienced and ethical ceramic restorer always uses the conservation method to strengthen objects, remove accumulations of old repairs that may injure the object, and works with only those materials that won’t damage the object’s substance, thus preserving and protecting it for future generations.

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Your porcelain plate or antique breaks into several pieces … what to do?! Do not glue it yourself! Some of the most irreparable harm for a ceramic or porcelain repair is done by the owner.

You should be aware that some glues are impossible to remove. This make repair by Luel Restoration Studio difficult or impossible.

Different ceramic materials need different mending materials. Each repair situation calls for its own unique glue or mending material that can only be decided on by our experienced artist.

We use an incredible variety of materials, equipment and techniques that are dependant on the specific repair needed. Removing and repairing substandard gluing adds a significant amount of time, effort, and difficulty to the porcelain restoration process.

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Luel Restoration Studio — Home  

A subject close to our hearts is of course, porcelain, and “A Cup of Light,” is a great novel written around the topic of the intricacies of Chinese porcelain and the world of imitators and smugglers. It’s not a new book, published in 2003, but you may know the author, Nicole Mones, by her first book, “Lost in Translation,” which was made into the movie of the same name.

This is a fictional tale of a specialist in Chinese porcelain for a Sotheby’s-like art dealer who flies to Beijing to appraise a treasure trove of imperial porcelain pots secretly offered for sale by a Chinese businessman.

It’s an interesting read with so much Chinese porcelain art history being such a huge part of the story with the author’s detailed descriptions of the process and the history of Chinese porcelain.

If you are interested in the modern art world or porcelain art history, this is a good read.

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