The Final Piece

The Parthian jug has now been completed! Last time, I put the pieces together and left the adhesive to dry. Today, I cleaned up the vessel, talked it over with Claudia, and took photographs. There were a couple pieces that I was not sure about and thus left out. In consultation with Claudia, we decided that two of them could be fit in. One we estimated was from a hole on the foot of the jug. The piece did not have fitted edges with the whole, but that was the only place big enough for the sherd to go, and the look of the sherd seemed to fit with the surrounding pieces. I used liberal amounts of the Paraloid B-72, which acted like a gap fill to hold the sherd in place.

The other piece was trickier. We thought that it could possibly go in the large hole on the back of the jug, but it was slightly too big. It, too, did not have a perfect fit for surrounding edges, so I had left it out. Now that we thought we had discovered the only place it possibly could go, unless it was part of another pot, it was locked out. The angle was such that there was no way I could fit it in place. This is where the consolidation of the edges helps. Paraloid B-72 is a thermoplastic adhesive, which means that heating it up will loosen it. Between heat and acetone, the resin can be almost entirely removed. Using a hair dryer (so high-tech!), I heated up the piece that I needed to take out and the joins that I wanted to move. I wiggled out the piece that had locked out the one I wanted to put in. This allowed me to start to put the sherd in its place, but it still was too big for the gap. I applied pressure to the sherds, and I heated up some more joins. Using pressure to move the pieces almost imperceptibly, I was able to pop the piece in place. The entire process was about moving the surrounding pieces nanometers or less, but it was the difference between a piece fitting or not.

The first piece I added is the triangle at the bottom, and the locked out piece that I wanted to add is the small trapezoid to the right, dividing the two gaps. Here, it is almost in place, but still popping up because the space was too small.

After putting these sherds in place, I cleaned off the excess adhesive with acetone and photographed the jug. The photographs were put in the digital image database, and the jug was put away. I truly enjoyed this experience. Next time, perhaps I will do a more challenging ceramic.