As these arise in the studio I will try to take some pictures and update as we go along. This happened when I was assembling a teapot just a couple of weeks ago.
I had trimmed the teapot a little thin around the foot and as I was attaching the handle to the pot I pushed a little hard and it cracked around the foot where the pot meets the foot. This is how I fixed it:
On the outside – I added a little water and pushed it back together and smoothed it out. On the inside I added some reinforcements. I added a very small coil of leather hard clay. I dipped the coil in water and gently placed it on the inside where I thought the crack was, then I smoothed it out with my finger until it was not very noticeable. Later as I am futzing around with it I realized I had not added the coil in the right place so I simply added another one. The coil is super small about the size of angel hair spaghetti and it is leather hard. I don’t score or add slip, I simply dip the entire coil in water and place it along the crack and smooth it out. Its very important to not add to much water or overwork the clay. It can crack more and that’s not a good thing after spending 10 hours on making and decorating a teapot to have a small crack that will destroy the entire pot is not easy to deal with.
Its important to note that once its smoothed out I stop futzing with it. I let it be and don’t worry about it any longer. Its fixed. If I am still worried when I am glazing it I will add more glaze to that spot, to help it out but its not really necessary.
The teapot turned out fine! In the end I was not even able to tell which one had the issue!