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Got a call in April about a granite balustrade on a building off Franklin. Turn of the century work. One of the iron posts had rusted through at the base and the whole section was sagging maybe two inches. Building owner wanted it replaced. I told him no. The granite was fine. It was the iron shoe that died. So I cut the old shoe off, forged a new one to match the profile, pinned it through the stone with two stainless rods and set it in epoxy. Took two days. Cost him a third of what a replacement run would have. Went back last week to check it. Still dead level. The building's been there since 1928. That repair should outlast both of us. I keep thinking about how easy it would have been to rip the whole thing out and put something new in. That's what everybody does now. Nobody wants to repair anything anymore. But the granite had another hundred years in it. The pattern on that balustrade is not something you order off a catalog. Repair work doesn't get you shows. Nobody writes an essay about the post you saved. But standing there last week with a level in my hand, watching that needle hold dead center, that was a good afternoon. If you're a young fabricator, learn to fix things. Not just make things. There's a trade in it and it'll keep you honest.

Got a commission a few months ago to repair and restore this old family photo that was basically falling apart. Water damage, creases, the edges gone gray. I almost said no because I don't do restoration work, I make things. But the woman who brought it in had this look. Her grandmother in the photo. Only copy. So I did it. Carefully, slow, like the whole thing was made of ash. And somewhere in the middle of it I realized the line between repairing and making is fake. You're still just deciding what stays and what goes and what gets to be seen. She picked it up yesterday and cried in my studio. Hugged me. I'm not a hugger but I let it happen. Anyway I've been thinking about that all week. The whole time I've been collecting broken things to make art from, and the one piece I actually fixed mattered more than any of it.

After a year and a half of watching from the sidelines they finally trusted me with an actual 17th-century map at the studio. Not just humidifying and flattening, the real thing. Tear repairs, filling a loss the size of my thumbnail, the whole slow careful dance. I've been doing conservation work since art school but always behind someone. Yesterday I sat with that map for six hours and my hands did not shake once. That sounds like a small thing but it isn't. The paper is so thin you can see the light through it and there's something about touching something that old with your bare fingers, knowing you're the one responsible for it being there tomorrow. My coworker said the map smelled like tobacco and old ships. It doesn't. It smells like nothing at all, which is what three hundred years of being properly kept does to paper. I think that's the part I love. Nothingness that was fought for.

Three weeks without the press. Sent the bearings off to a fella in Clare who said he'd have them done in a week, took three, sure what's the rush in Clare. I was half-convinced I'd get it back and something else would be wrong with it, or I'd forgotten how to print altogether. Stripped it down, cleaned everything I could reach while I was waiting, found a biscuit wrapper the youngest had posted through the roller gap back in February. Reassembled it this afternoon with a spanner I'd left out in the rain and had to dry off on the Aga. Pulled the first proof an hour ago. An old block, a hare I've carved so many times I could do it in my sleep. And it just... worked. Clean. Even pressure. The ink laid down like it was glad to be there. I stood there staring at it for longer than I'd admit. The missus came in and said "is that it" and I said yeah that's it and she said "grand" and went back to putting the kids to bed. Which is exactly the right amount of fuss. If you've got a tool or a machine or a process that's been sitting broken and you're dreading getting back to it, just get the first one done. The second one's easy after that.

finished a piece yesterday night that's been fighting me for weeks. one of the panels had a corner snap off during transport and I repaired it so clean you genuinely can't tell where it broke. and that's the problem. the whole piece is about the thing that cracked and the repair is so invisible it might as well not have happened. the seam should be part of the work. I spent two hours making it disappear and now I want to break it again on purpose and do it ugly this time. anyone else ever fix something too well and ruin the point?

I been putting off a repair on a quilt for a lady from over in Tuscaloosa for a good three weeks, just dreading it. The cloth was her mama's apron from the seventies, thin as onion skin in places, and I was scared I'd cut wrong and ruin what she trusted me with. Well. I pulled out my grandmother's old Singer this morning, the treadle one she learned on, and it hummed for me like it was alive. That machine has outlived three houses and more grief than I care to name, and it still sews a straighter seam than I can manage by hand on my best day. The apron's whole and the lady's gonna cry when she sees it, and I sat back and told the Lord thank you for giving me hands that still know what to do. Mighty small thing, but it felt big today. That's the win. That's always been the win.

I keep a small notebook with every brush I've ever owned. The maker, the size, the year I bought it, and the year it finally gave out. My oldest current one is a Series 7 No. 2 from 1998. The ferrule is worn thin and the handle has my thumbprint worn into the lacquer, but the point still holds like the first day I drew it across a test sheet. I don't know why I started the docket. I think I wanted proof that care adds up, that a hand does its own kind of bookkeeping. A student asked me last week why I bother repairing brushes instead of replacing them. She meant it kindly. I told her that a new brush knows nothing yet. Mine remember which paper I used in 2004, and they behave accordingly. She laughed the way people do when they think you're joking. I wasn't. It occurs to me I've outlived every painting I ever made in some sense, because paintings stop changing and I don't. But the brushes do. They wear down to match the hand that holds them, and that's the one honest collaboration I have in this room.

Today I was cleaning my brushes after finishing a small fish motif piece and I counted the years on the oldest one. That brush came from my mother's hand when I was maybe seventeen. She gave it to me for my first independent commission, a wedding scroll. It has lost hairs, the handle is wrapped in thread twice over, but the point is still true. My son says I should buy new ones, that the bamboo from the market is cheap. But a brush that has learned your hand is not the same as a new one. It knows how much pressure I put when I am drawing the fine lines of the peacock feathers. New brush, it will wobble. This one, it behaves. People these days they think tools are to be replaced when they become old. I think tools become useful only when they become old. Like a good wife's rolling pin or my father's plough, still in the shed even though we have tractor now. Some things you keep because they carry the memory of the work. The thread wrapping is from my mother's old sari, by the way. So even the repair is from her. How can I throw that away. 🙏

Someone dropped off a first edition at the studio for a repair quote. A real first edition, 1920s, beautiful cloth. I spent forty minutes handling it and all I could think was that I wanted to tear a page out of it. Obviously I didn't, it goes back to the owner tomorrow, but that feeling, that urge, it's the first thing that's moved me in over a year. I've been stuck since last autumn. Every piece I start feels like a decision I can't make. I've got a drawer full of beginnings that are just paper I cut and didn't place. But looking at that book, something shifted. Knowing I couldn't touch it made me want to. I went home and cut up a perfectly good paperback I've read twice, and I don't even know what I'm making yet, but I started. Funny that the thing that gets you going is the thing you're not allowed to have.

There's a Miller Syncrowave 250 at the shared shop I work out of some days. Been there twenty years. Last month the high-frequency start started sputtering. Now it's catching about half the time. Rest of the time the arc wanders and you get this weird snake-track bead. I keep asking the guy who runs the place to call a service tech. He says he'll get to it. Meanwhile three of us are just working around it, wasting gas and tungsten, telling ourselves it's fine. It's not fine. A machine that old, you respect it or you replace it. You don't let it limp along getting worse. Anyone else dealing with equipment that needs real maintenance and nobody's stepping up? Or is it just my shop that runs on deferred repair.