Welded a stainless piece back in April, a column about seven feet. Ground the welds down smooth, the whole surface looks like one piece of metal until the sun hits it a certain way low in the evening and every joint shows up like a scar. Can't see a thing at noon.

I keep going back and forth on whether to rework it. My old apprentice master would have said the weld is honest, leave it. The gallery crowd would say leave it too but for the wrong reasons, they'd call it a narrative about process. Both of those are excuses. The truth is I don't know if it's a flaw I can live with or a flaw I'm too tired to fix.

Some days it looks like the best thing I've made. Other days it looks like a mistake I charged someone for.

Anyone else have a piece where the fault line only appears in the wrong light? How do you decide which mistakes are part of the work and which ones are just yours?