[kelnos]

I've attended one of those at the Zen Center! My partner took me to one as a birthday present last year. She ended up being kinda frustrated with the process, but I found it soothing and relaxing, and left happy and contented.

The guy running the workshop had us use epoxy and not urushi powder (not surprising; I'm sure all of us would have ended up with severe skin irritation otherwise). The article mentions concerns about food safety; IIRC we were told that the epoxy we were using in the workshop was not food safe, but that it's easy to acquire food-safe versions of it.

We also didn't do this in anywhere near as many steps, with as many different treatments for different sizes/shapes of damage. Ultimately we fully repaired a piece in a couple hours, not the several months that the article author took to do it right. (And the extra care and use of the proper materials shows; the final repaired alligator mug from the article looks orders of magnitude better than my work.)