Most people today associate urushi with decorative lacquerware, maki-e, raden, fountain pens or museum objects. But through most of its long history, lacquer was also used for very practical reasons: to protect, reinforce, seal and repair objects that were meant to be used.
And I use it exactly this way in my own kitchen.
I have wooden spatulas, spoons, chopsticks, serving boards, bowls and other tools finished with fuki-urushi. Some are handmade, but many started as the cheapest wooden utensils available in a supermarket. A few of the spatulas have now been in regular kitchen use for seven or eight years.
In the new video I show what this kind of real use does to an urushi surface — abrasion, dents, exposed wood and occasional more serious damage — and how I maintain these objects instead of replacing them.
I cover:
- cleaning and preparing used kitchen tools,
- sanding old fuki-urushi surfaces,
- renewing the surface with raw urushi,
- dealing with exposed and porous wood,
- working with woods such as olive and teak,
- repairing damaged areas with urushi, rice glue and diatomaceous earth,
- wiping the fuki-urushi layer,
- and curing the renewed objects in the furo.
What I particularly like about this approach is that maintenance becomes part of the object’s life. When a wooden utensil comes back to the studio after months or years of use, worn areas can be stabilized and another very thin layer of urushi added.
The object does not need to remain perfect. It simply keeps going.
Watch the video: I Lacquer Everything! Urushi in the Kitchen.
The next video in this series will start at the opposite end: a completely raw, inexpensive wooden spatula and the full process of turning it into a finished fuki-urushi kitchen tool.
