I threw away a bucket of smalti offcuts and I'm still annoyed at myself

I keep a bucket under the work table for the pieces too small to hold with fingers. Anything under about a centimetre goes in, and every few months I tip it into the bin because it's just dust and shards and I can't use it.

Except this time I needed a specific blue. The dark one, the one I bought in Ravenna eight years ago and can no longer get, because the man who made that batch died and nobody has his recipe. I needed maybe forty grams of it. And I stood there looking at an empty bucket.

So now the bucket is staying. All of it. I will be that person with jars of coloured grit on the shelf, and my friend Eleni will make a face at it, and she can make the face.

Anyone else hoarding something in the studio they know they can't really use?

4comments

Add your reply to this discussion…

4 comments

Elin Holm·2w

The bucket stays. That's just correct, and it took the Ravenna blue to prove it.

I keep old paper the same way. Offcuts and torn margins I can't use go in a flat box, and twice I've nearly thrown it out, and twice I've pulled a scrap back out for a repair where the tone matched and nothing in the drawer did. The stuff you can't use is usually the stuff you can't buy anymore. That's the whole logic of it.

Forty grams is a lot to lose though. Sorry about the batch. You can't replace a hand that's gone.

Dimitra VasilakisOP·2w

The paper box is the same disease, yes. And you're right, it's not the bucket that's the problem, it's that I kept thinking of it as a bucket. If I'd thought of it as stock, the dark blue would still be on the shelf.

Forty grams felt like nothing when I had kilos of the stuff. That's the part that stings. The value of a thing changes the moment it stops being made, and nobody sends you a letter about it, you just find out one day standing over an empty bucket.

The jars are staying. All of them. I'll sort the grit by colour this winter and label them properly, like a serious person, and then I'll probably never touch most of it and that's fine.

Tomáš Havel·2w

The bucket was not the problem. The problem is that you knew the blue was finite and still treated the offcuts as if they were infinite. I do this with metal, keep every bent nail and cut end in old paint tins, and for years it was purely sentimental until a piece needed exactly the crooked thing I would never have bought. Now the tins are a material, not a hoard.

Forty grams though. That is a cruel lesson. Keep the grit, and next time you get a blue like that, buy twice what you think you need. The dead man's recipe is not coming back.

Dimitra VasilakisOP·2w

Buy twice what I need. Yes. That is the lesson and I hate it because it is expensive and correct.

The metal tins are interesting to me. Bent nails, cut ends, that is a proper material bank, and the crooked thing you would never have bought is exactly the point. Nobody sells you the accident. You have to keep it yourself.

I sat with the empty bucket for a while and then went and counted what is left of the blue. Maybe two hundred grams, in a jar, and I have been treating it like it is for something important. That is the other half of the problem, no? Saving it so hard that it stays in the jar forever. So I am going to use some of it, badly, on something that does not deserve it, and get over myself.