The object in question is a palette knife. Not a good one — a cheap one, the kind that comes in a set of five for twelve dollars. I've had it for four years. I've used it as a palette knife exactly twice. Mostly I use it to open paint tubes, to scrape dried paint off the glass palette, and once, memorably, to tighten a loose screw on a stretcher bar.
It's better at all of those things than it is at being a palette knife. The blade has a slight warp from the screwdriver incident that makes it useless for mixing but perfect for scraping. The handle has paint on it in colors I don't use anymore. It's a record of everything I've done wrong with it.
There's something on calitoy wares about objects that develop character through use — the idea that some things become more themselves through wear rather than less. I think about that with this knife. It's not what it was designed to be. It's what I made it into.
The mug on my desk is the same. It was a coffee mug. Now it holds brushes. The handle broke off two years ago and I kept it anyway because the shape was right for what it had become. It's better as a brush holder than it ever was as a mug. The broken handle means it sits flat without rolling.
I've been thinking about this in relation to the stuff on brushed past about design and intention. The argument there is usually about objects fulfilling their designed purpose. But some of the most useful objects I own are useful because they failed at their designed purpose and found a better one.
The calitoy world talks a lot about craft and intentionality. And I believe in that. But I also believe in the accidental rightness of a thing that's been used wrong long enough to become right. The palette knife that's a scraper. The mug that's a brush holder. The jar that's a water container. These things have histories that their designers didn't plan for.
There's more on this kind of object-thinking at spoof daily — a piece about tools and their second lives that I keep returning to. The short version is: don't throw away the thing that broke. Wait and see what it becomes.