Four Saxes à la Petr Florianek (Part II)

The next project I had was more or less the centerpiece of my work in CZ and the hub of my learning.  It utilized my design skills and all the material and technical aspects of what I was trying to pick up.  The blade itself was an early experiment in multi-bar pattern-welding, and, while the manipulation of pattern is certainly less than dazzling, the geometry and proportions of the blade were pleasing to me, and I decided to use it. 

With a wide profile and a thick spine, I wanted the handle to echo that sturdiness and straight lines, especially with the parallel grooves I scraped out of the blade.  The materials I chose to meet my designs were elk antler and bog oak, both strong words in the mouth and stout things in the hand.  They also have strong intrinsic narrative properties, at least for me, and evoke ancient things when I touch and smell and admire them. 

The blade shape, construction, and features I had constructed were inspired by drawings I had seen from a record of Vendelperiod graves, and Petr's practiced eye placed them in the 7th century.  Following that judgement, I turned further to books full of period ornament to see what would flow from the page onto my piece.  The Salin style-II biting-beast chain I had drawn earlier fit perfectly around the waist of the handle.  I became infatuated with strange faces within ellipses that seemed to permeate the ornament, and I decided to incorporate them. 

 I brought my ideas to Petr to discuss application, and he suggested I try my hand at engraving, a common method of decoration for the historical work in question, as well as  particularly applicable and striking in the brass that I was going to use as the ferrule and butt-cap.  So, I rolled some brass out and squared it up, sizing to a paper mock-up.  Petr showed me how to attach it to a block of wood with a little bit of black pitch, which was then placed in an engraver's ball vise.  Next, he showed me his v- and round-tipped push gravers, and how to use them.  I spent hours and hours hunched over a small table in his backyard, filled with matched frustration and determination, constantly enraged by the loss of control when the graver slipped and the endless gratification of it making the exact cut you want it to.

My control got better and better, but my injuries did not turn around so quickly.  My hands were soon covered with scrapes and cuts from brass burrs and puncture wounds from the graver itself.  But it was worth it when my work yielded recognizable but strange moustachioed faces, staring pupil-less from the brass. 

The next step was to remove the antler waist and transfer my design onto it, which was certainly an exercise in eyeballing!  It went over pretty well, and I altered the lines to match the cuts I was going to make with the dremel.  I can't really convey exactly what it's like to cut antler with a dremel tool, but it's soft and grainless, and it's pretty much like cutting butter.  It's going to cut exactly where you put it, so you better put it exactly where you want it.  It's not like filing, where material is removed (relatively) slowly and you can plan it out while it's happening.  You have to have a plan and stick to it, because there's no following your groove and coasting along the cut.

That said, if you know what you're doing and have the feel for it, you can make it exactly as your heart desires.  It also means that its speed and power in antler make for very quick work.  Also antler just looks awesome, and I'm going to be using a lot of it, as well as carving a lot of it when I have the tools. 

 Project #3, really quick, was the re-hilting of an old sax blade I made in Worcester, Massachusetts with my good friend Jack McAuliffe of Underhill Edge.  I knew it was vaguely early-Frankish in design, and I knew that most Frankish saxes from that period have limited non-organic materials apart from the blade, so I wanted my principle elements to be wood, antler, and leather. 

I made a curving handle I felt complimented the design, and I ought to pay due here to the extensive research of Jeroen Zuiderwijk, a Dutchman whose work has really bolstered the historicity of the bladesmithing community.  He more or less started the trend of long, accurate handles. 

 I couldn't resist the new technique Petr had developed for texturing sheet, however, and I decided to do in brass what he had done in silver in this knife.  I also set risers where I felt they were ergonomically desirable, dyed some leather, and wrapped it all up.

With a lot more carving, steel-wooling, scraping, and banging things around to make them fit, I had four unfinished pieces but a lot of new things flowing between my hands and my head.  It'll be more hard adventure to finish it all up, but doors have been opened and I'll charge through them, messily at first but always getting better.

Stay tuned for finishing the handles, making the scabbards, and hopefully some more originality on my part!

Four Saxes à la Petr Florianek (Part I)

But to the work!  As I said, Petr and I agreed that we would work side-by-side on our respective projects, and I'd be free to ask him for advice, instructions, etc., in which I did not hold back.  Being the open-minded teacher he is, he asked me for the occasional advice as well, but he's got a strongly guiding muse if anyone does, and usually has a very clear idea of what he's up to.  My mission was to soak up some of Petr's excellent sense of material and composition, where I had little experience.  In the realm of what bladesmithing is as a craft to me, I felt that my skills to forge and finish blades were sufficient for my current learning stage, and that my artistic growth lay in the direction of Petr's strengths: handle/scabbard/accent material, decoration, and aesthetic cohesion thereof.

So, in order to concentrate on those goals, I gathered up a small collection of pattern-welded blades I had lying around, unfinished, and resolved to dress them in handles to expose myself to the materials, processes and challenges of Petr and his work.  Fortunately, all the blades fit well with his somewhat specialized historical tangent: Vendel- and pre-Viking-period knives and saxes.  If you're a new reader and are unfamiliar with the importance of saxes in my life, check out this ancient post.  They're exciting and fascinating vehicles for the exploration of Iron Age Germanic art through the craft of bladesmithing.  I'd dipped into it in the forging, but the true shaping came with the handle-making.  Petr showed me the above trick (attributed to Jake Powning) of designing a handle by sticking the blade through the paper, because there is something about two-dimensional drawings that doesn't translate exactly right to three-dimensional work, especially with something as organic as a knife handle.

Petr set me up with books and PDFs aplenty and told me to look for designs that fit the spaces I envisioned filling, to pay attention to dates and provenance of artifacts for historical cohesion, and to just use my design sense in terms of density and spacing to adapt them to my piece.  If that doesn't sound difficult, it is.  I settled on the one to the right, a 7th century Swedish design, and sketched it out to see if I could get a sort of bone-knowledge of the lines.  I felt that I did, and showed it to Petr.  He said that was not enough: that one also must understand how the lines must interact with the material: how the lines will be made and defined, with what tools, and attention to the use of positive and negative space and degrees of depth. 

It was also challenging to draw the design to scale as it would appear on the piece, especially if it had curvature around the handle.  That involved little tricks like wrapping a piece of paper around the handle, sizing it, and drawing it on that.  But while I was working on the design for one piece, I was already making the simpler handle for another.  The small broken-back seax to the left (part one and part two) was promised to a customer who gave me a beautiful block of figured walnut for the handle.  I cut two slabs, dremeled out the inside (work with Petr was very dremel-heavy), and glued them together with a tight fit.  That was step one of something I repeated with all the saxes and still definitely stand to improve upon. 

After I had the handle roughed out, I had to choose a design for it.  I was stuck by some brass openwork, from either scabbard or shield hardware, of contemporary Anglo-Saxon origin, which I believed I could make work with the blade profile.  I set some boundaries on the top and bottom with brass ferrules, and decided the method of ornamentation would be dremel carving. 

 I decided on an antler bolster within the ferrule, and carved a recess accordingly.  I did the same on the handle butt, although I had a less clear plan about what that was going to look like.  Now the jewelrymaking skills I gained from my short class at Maine College of Art would be put to my first true test of applicability.  Granted, none of it was really difficult jewelry-wise, but I'm glad I had the grounding in preparing, working, and finishing non-ferrous metals.

I used a simple design for the first bolster that made a good tutorial: brass, rolled to thickness, cut and filed to size, chiseled with lines, soldered, cleaned up, and tight-fit.  It looked good, but the antler bolster had become so thin on the ends of the tang-hole that I decided to hold it down with brass tacks.  It was very helpful that Petr had a high-quality rolling mill for non-ferrous sheet and wire.  It was awesome to see him melt down his silver scrap in a small crucible, cast it into a flat, rectangular ingot, roll out the casting into sheet, and cut it into wire.  You only need a few tools and ingenuity, but these allow a lot of control and an incredible lack of waste in jewelrywork.

For the butt-cap of the handle I wanted matching lines with the lower ferrule.  I also wanted a brass ring hammered out of a piece of squared wire and twisted together at the ends  (one of Petr's signature accents).  I debated a few ways of attaching it and ended up looping it through a strap riveted inside the handle.  But before I could do that, I had to solder a cap onto the butt-end ferrule.

While I'm not ecstatic about the work I did on this particular handle, it definitely set the stage for me to expand my work on the next three.  Soldering, chiseling, hammering to shape, predicting fit and cutting accordingly: these were the skills that I knew I would need to improve, and I relished the challenge. Developing my technique with the dremel, of course, was the great task of my experimentation, being generally familiar with every other tool I used, and it was really only an introduction; once I get one I'm going to just have to put in the hours to get proficient at it. 

This was just the beginning of my introduction to Petr's vast array of skills and deep-running artistic sense, and it's obviously revolutionary for my work.  I can only continue to pay it the homage it deserves in bettering my own skills and sense, just as Petr does for the great unnamed artists of the past.  

June 2013: Two weeks with Petr Floriánek

The passionate journey I have been on for the past three years pursuing knowledge, craft, and community has already lead me thousands of miles away from my home both East and West.  The fulfillment I have found and the hunger I have for more only reaffirm this as a lifelong journey, which is interwoven with the rest of my life's tapestry in ways I may never fully realize, but can always feel pulsing under the surface of things.

Petr assuming the guise of Grímnir

With the sale of my first sword and the generous invitation of the brilliant beacon of creativity Petr Floriánek, I was able to purchase tickets for a two-week trip to the Czech Republic at the end of June.  The agreement we made was that I would stay with him at no cost to either of us, and that we would work side-by-side on our respective projects.  Obviously I realized the immense amount of observation I stood to gain from.  Petr's work has been a constant source of inspiration for me, and I do not use that word lightly in any sense.

The pieces born in his mind and formed in his hands come not only from there, but also from elsewhere.  There is an impressive amount of study and experience behind Petr's design and craft, but there is also a certain element that cannot be accounted for among waking life.  There is a channeling, a tapping of ancient things beneath his pieces that are not entirely tangible.  Anyone can make a blade incorporating wrought iron, carve some Salin style II serpent-ornamentation on the antler handle and call it "period".  There is a harmony beyond subtlety that transcends technical perfection and artistic style.  This sense permeates Petr's work.

With a buzzing sense of excitement growing in my spine, coupled with the heady surrealism of being in a country whose language you do not speak, I arrived in the Czech Republic.  A cobblestone road lead from the palpably post-Communist outdoor train stop into Petr's small village on the outskirts of Prague.  It was nearly evening by the time Petr and I arrived at his village, after a bottle of top-notch local lager (which I spilled in my nervousness), and we proceeded to his house where I was introduced to my free quarters for the next two weeks. 

There is a cobblestone street in his town where a small stone barn and a smaller stone house huddle next to each other among newer houses, separated only by a humble swathe of grass leading into a shady yard.  The house belongs to Petr, Baška, and their two children.  The barn is his shop.  As we walked between them, I marveled at the dark, weathered wooden beams between the stones, sturdy but looking like moss would not have been out of place on the old timbers.  I was delighted to see that the round backyard was surrounded on all sides by impressive stone slopes--twenty feet high!  In the middle of the quiet, breezy, protected clearing stood a table, chairs, and a spacious linen tent: my bedroom for the next two weeks.

An avid Viking-age reenactor, Petr is outfitted with highly functional and comfortable Viking belongings.  I can barely describe how deliciously cozy it is to sleep outside on a wooden bed under a linen roof swathed in rabbit fur for two weeks, many nights in the driving rain, sometimes in the gentle whispering of trees. 

That night I sat under the stars at the table by my tent with Petr, Baška, and two bottles of good wine, exercising our cross-cultural conversational skills while discussing politics and spirituality, a habit that did not lessen throughout my stay (though the tension around it did, considerably).  In the wee hours we retired, all of us working the following day, but it was the beginning of a friendship that I was both excited to pursue and eager to see what fruits it would bear.  Baška, Petr, and their incredible children gave me their full selves, open and unabashed, and I can't put into words my gratitude for the time and spirit they showed me.  I can only contribute to the growth of our friendship which will last for many years to come, hopefully in many forms and adventures!

Needless to say, the majority of my time was spent sharing Petr's shop with him, and often using it alone when he spent time with his family.   Somehow, we managed to fit lots of conversation and adventures into the times between making, and that's what this blog post is for--the work can wait.

The first weekend of my stay, Petr took me out into the majestic Slavic pines, where he and his Viking group own some idyllic land surrounded by fields, forests and the great dome of the sky.  The weekend's work was to build the frame of a small Viking house, spearheaded by his hardworking friend Mira, whose progress can be found here.  We spent long days chopping down and cutting up trees (all with axes), carrying them a distance, stripping them of bark with draw knives, charring the ends of vertical beams, planting them with rocks--by the end I was sore and tired and not much help anymore.  But we were well rewarded with a bright fire, good bread (everywhere in the Czech Republic), meat, cheese, beer, and strong, clean air. 

Petr, Mira, me, and Ráďa (left to right), definitely exhausted.

The next weekend, the family Floriánek/Floriánkova took me to a town called Kutná Hora, which houses the grotesque and fascinating Sedlec Ossuary: a church that houses the artfully arranged skulls of some 40,000 victims of the bubonic plague and the Hussite Wars.  Today it is an unassuming museum, cool, damp, and dusty.

It was almost difficult to comprehend where I was and what I was seeing: the gravity and implications of 40,000 skulls is not something grasped easily within my own cranium.  I felt like just another skull, honestly.  On every wall, bundles of bones hung like dried flowers, and muted light from the windows cast everything in a sort of gray.  The ornamentation hovered somewhere on the border of  morbid and ironic.  Such a dichotomy may have been symbolically alluded to in the intersecting circles playing across the vaulted ceilings (there's an architectural vesica for you, Peter Johnsson!).  Lately I have been reading about the proliferation of witch-hunts in Europe in the 17th century, and the driving force seems to have been a combination of severe repression and crushing boredom among the religious and illiterate, which encompassed practically everyone.  I can only assume that such a situation could be what drove priests to exhume tens of thousands of skeletons and arrange them like so many Lego bricks. 

This is just one of the ancient and alien places we visited, and I don't if I'll ever comprehend the nature of places so long built upon by humans.  The film of civilization seems transparent by comparison in most parts of America, but often more vulgar.   I think I feel it most in churches: those in Europe know more of the struggle and secrets of the spiritualism of a people.  I am not a religious person but there's something to feel in those stones, as with so many other things so intertwined with the past.

St. Barbara's church and Prague Castle were awesome to behold, filling your body with the presence and ideas of countless people of the past, slipped between the stones and hovering in the shadowed corners waiting to be found.  As breathtaking as grand scale is, I usually find most joy in the smaller or more out-of-the-way things, details, or coincidences.  One of my favorite adornments of St. Barbara's was this fresco in a window alcove.  Though huge (possibly 20 feet tall), it could not compete with the majesty of the whole church, and enjoyed its muted sunlight in quiet contemplation.  It portrayed a raggedly-dressed man, bearded and barefoot striding across a stream with a great walking stick.  There was no explanation, but my mind went instantly to a Wanderer archetype, an Odin or Berggeist or Grímnir forever seeking, like Petr's grim visage at the top of my post.

But that is not the image that stands with me when I look back on my trip, particularly of Petr.  I think mostly of crouching over my work at the jewelry bench, with him behind me at the grinder, in our own worlds of creation and handwork, or else on the way to a place I could not imagine, blissful in the surety of seeing something incredible.  But I think the most rewarding and hopeful experience was being part of a rich and full life, with equal parts maturity and childishness, intellect and intuition, seriousness and play, embodied by Petr and his family, and responsible for the quality of his work and his life, to which I am honored to have borne witness. 

Kard - Persian-inspired knife

For this post I will open with pictures of my work, and leave the inspiration and process for later.

I attempted in this blade to capture what the essence of the characteristically Persian kard (کارد; Farsi for "knife") is to me: a deviously slim blade presence with graceful lines and a refined handle that makes you itch to grasp it.  I think I was more successful in the former part than the latter, but I am utterly infatuated with this blade style and fully intend to develop my own knowledge and interpretation of it further in geometry, history, and materials.

I've always been very attracted to blades that I perceive to be the "everyday knife", but not in the way that a buck knife is.  Rather, I loved the idea of the fashion knife, the heirloom, the functional knife that's part of the costume.  What's wonderful about the idea to me is that it is still an everyday knife, but it's not a nobody.  The idea may be different, but in my paper about the sword as a subarchetypal character in Germanic myth, I liken some named swords to heroes.  Similarly, the 'heirloom knife' takes on a character, passing as it does from owner to owner, from land to land, from ship to shore, on the bodies at the belts of people who are doing things to change and connect the world.

The kard in particular embodies this romantic notion for me because of the Silk Road.  Persia, for many, many centuries under numerous names, rulers, religions, divisions, cultures, and empires, has stood at the geographical heart of Eurasia and seen passions and wars flow between the ends of the earth.  The Silk Road was the great artery of this heart, connecting across leagues, linking through people, carrying the fractal nature of action from one end of the world to the other with infinite consequences unknown to their perpetrators.

Ubiquitous among Persian archaeology is a knife that comes in many sizes, shapes, provenances, and qualities: the kard.  Most examples are exquisitely beautiful and luxurious, but show signs of use, perfectly exhibiting the dilemma of the handmade sword: simultaneous function and beauty; more abstractly, caring creation and brutal purpose. 

The blade on the left is my loose interpretation of the kard, with a very distinctive blade and handle profile. Mine is a more stripped-down version constructed of materials of my choice, rather than traditional ones. The blade is ~325 layers of folded 1095 and 15n20. The pattern produced by hand-hammering this laminated steel into the three-dimensional shape of a knife pushes the layers back and forth across their lateral planes and produces a wavy, swirly, eddying random pattern when the blade is ground flat. The visual effect, revealed after polishing by etching it in a corrosive, is a vaguely recognizable imitation of traditional Persian wootz crucible steel (pulâd, پولاد, in Farsi), which according to some may account for the highly confusing misnomer "Damascus steel". The blade is 8.25" in length and the overall length is 13.75", with a handle proportionally longer than most extant originals, and perhaps also narrower where it widens to meet the base of the blade.  The placement of the pins is less common but not unseen; some kard had tang constructions that were obscured by the handle and others were laminated between scales like mine. 

I have chosen some examples of originals to highlight the unbelievable beauty in form and decoration.  To the right is a 19th century Persian kard constructed similarly to mine, but made of wootz crucible steel and heavily carved, as well as inlaid and overlaid with gold wire, resplendent in graceful floral curves for which Persian craftspeople had an obvious eye; the form of their works and their written language itself attest to that.  It was very common for the koftgari wire overlay to contain verses from the Koran in Farsi, among other decorative calligraphy. 

The next original example is also a sublime piece of work.  Similarly constructed of pulâd, gold, and ivory, it would be an aesthetic triumph already even if it didn't contain some of the most incredible Middle Eastern steel carving I know of.  It's a technical masterpiece, but I am always amazed by how aesthetically partial I actually am to Persian art and craft regardless of technical complication.  I really like it.

I have to pay credit where it is due, of course.  Though I have admired the kard for many years, I will proudly and unashamedly say that what inspired me to make this knife was the very similar (but generally superior in all aspects and overall execution to mine) kard by none other than Kevin Klein, apprentice to JD Smith.  To the right is the only known photograph of it.  During my class with Mastersmith Smith, Kevin was his right hand man and taught me equally as much.  I was captivated by the grace and obvious lethality of his piece, and how it sat in my hand like it was alive.  His blade pattern was deliberately smokier, his finish fine and precise, and his signature filework exquisite and honestly unfathomable.  Needless to say, I wanted to make my own.

I can only say so much on the subject of crucible steel that is generally referred to as "wootz", and if anyone's interested I can personally refer them to Mr. Jeff Pringle of Oakland, California, who has experimented extensively with the smelting, forging, patterning, and finishing of wootz steel.  I have a negligible amount of knowledge on the subject despite his best efforts to educate me, and I'm afraid it will be some years before I can carry a conversation on the subject.  But I think it has an unparalleled ethereal beauty.  The above example is striking in subtlety and contrast both.  Having personally experienced the incredibly difficult workability of wootz, and with my struggles with carving and inlay, I have some serious respect for whoever inlaid this steel with that gold and beautiful calligraphy.   Kind of like I do for Jeff Pringle on his creative piece. 

So, back to my piece!  My blade lies here, during its stoning and preliminary sharpening, on the back porch of my wonderful, beautiful Boston apartment that I loved dearly.  To the right are the lower bolsters I forged and ground by hand from ~200 year old wrought iron from a scrapped New Hampshire graveyard fence.  The handle scales are moose antler I purchased in Worcester, MA from a quirky and fascinating shop called Bones and Flowers, run by a wonderful woman called Tannin who wants to talk about leather and bone and horn and antler until the cows come home to be turned into craft material.  Seriously, if you stop in to see her, and talk to her a while, you're going to talk for a long time and then get some good deals on the things you've been eying while talking to her.  The people you meet on the journey of craft, as in anything you pursue to unusual places, are artful to say the least. 

I attached the bolsters mechanically with copper rivets; that is, without any adhesive.  The scales were epoxied and then riveted as well.  I have to say, it was totally a pain in the ass to try to rivet at that angle.  At the butt-end of the piece (see bottom photo), I embellished the tang with totally personal European-influenced filework, sandwiched between the protruding "ears" of the scales.  I felt the "ear" feature was appropriate given its appearance on some kard and pronounced ubiquity in the Turkish yataghan.  The filework was topically inappropriate but a good learning experience and fun artistic license.  I was very pleased with the color and texture composition of the piece, and felt that I had captured in a small way the refined aesthetic of the originals that inspired me.  However, my treatment of the materials and the way I decorated them leaves a decidedly European taste in my mouth.  In the end, that's what I am a product of, and I think I truly don't have the capacity to make anything else right now.  That said, this piece is a true representation of my aesthetic, aspirations (failed and achieved), influences, and progress so far. 


Stay tuned for the making of the sheath!

Making at MassArt

In March, I wrote a little bit about my bladesmithing class at MassArt with JD Smith.  I wanted to write a little bit more about what I actually did in the class, what I learned from JD, and how my world of making has evolved. 


JD is a deliberate and clear teacher, whose strength as an educator perpetuating the craft lies in the universal respect he holds for his students and the standards he holds them to.  He treats his students like the next generation of craftspeople.  He speaks intelligently and coherently to them, expecting them to understand and to ask questions when they don't; to engage directly and honestly.  In this way, he is able to ask his students to push themselves, to follow their intuitions but also to respect experience and perspective.  The result is a knowledgeable and talented student base, with a great array of individuality in their work.  Anyone who has taken bladesmithing at MassArt is well-informed and interested.  JD awakes both artistic passion and the seriousness of craft in his students, and is an invaluable asset to the growth and life of bladesmithing.  As for his work, it's skilled beyond my ability to judge, and more something I stand in awe of.  I might  also add that he's a captivating storyteller and evident badass.  If you find yourself in Boston, meet him.  If you live there, take his class.

 Now to the technical stuff!  The materials we used in class were 1095, a simple low-alloy high-carbon steel, and 15n20, a steel that behaves very similarly in heat treatment and welds to 1095 very well, but contains a certain amount of nickel for contrast with the 1095.  JD truly taught me how to draw, cut, and fold billets efficiently.  We started out with eleven layers of laminated steel, and I decided that for my pattern, I wanted to fold it to about 325 layers and hand-hammer for random pattern.  On the left is a billet cut for folding at welding heat.

The billet was humongous, and I ended up cutting it in half.  The first half was used to forge a knife blank that I ruined irreversibly while practicing a difficult but later rewarding grinding technique JD showed me.   The second half was forged into the blank below, which was the first stage of creating a knife that is influenced, very much in form and function if not materials, by the native Persian kard (Farsi for "knife").

I'll go into more details about the artistic/aesthetic and cultural/historical details of the kard later, but right now I'm going to focus more on how JD's class has altered my style.  His forging is fast and efficient: he taught me that unless you have a specific pattern, there's no reason not to hammer the hell out of your billet on the fullering dies just to get the damn thing longer, because you have to do that quickly.  The flat dies are for squaring things up later, but they'll make everything alright, so you might as well get the quick and dirty stuff done.  Draw that billet out, square it, cut it, fold it, weld it, draw it out again.  He works hard to facilitate the rhythm of production, an essential part of making things.

The truly revolutionary part of the class for me was JD's well-explained and well-modeled grinding technique that gave me real insight on how you get an even grind.  I'll say that Owen Bush taught me how to grind a sword, but JD Smith taught me how to grind a knife.  Standing on one side of the belt, feet firmly planted, body relaxed, hands supporting but not truly gripping the knife, and constant, steady pressure (not too much!) against the belt.  Starting in the same place every time and slowly letting off as you get closer to the tip, which has less mass. 

One aspect of making things that I have struggled with (as a natural perfectionist) is failure and compromise with my work.  Basically, things rarely turn out the way you envisioned them when you're starting out, and it can be pretty heartbreaking.  I'm not saying veterans are immune to this either.  I had learned to do something about this, which was accepting flaws as an attribute of handmade objects, and to compromise with the object I was making.  

JD had something to say about that:

"Stop accepting flaws." 

That gave me a turn.  But I thought about it.  A lot.  And you know what?  Steel doesn't have a brain.  It's not going to outsmart you.  It's going to do whatever you want it to if you give yourself the time to think about it and the space to execute it.  It's not you against the material.  You don't have to compromise with it, you have to learn to speak its language and then you can say whatever you want. If you learn Romanian, you can write poetry in it.  How well is up to you.

The above picture does a poor job of illustrating it, but I was very pleased with the evenness and beauty of the grind (read  more of my obnoxiously spiritual musings on grinding).  The next step was clamping the blade up and hand-polishing with a grit-variety of waterstones from Falcon Tools, which JD and his incredible apprentice Kevin Klein converted me to.  I'm sick of sandpaper anyhow.  Stones keep things much flatter and do things more quickly, in my opinion.  There was much camaraderie among the students in the class at this point, as we all sat around a table with our blades clamped to it, stoning and talking away. 

But soon enough our blades were hardened, sharpened, and etched, and it was time to begin working on handle materials.  I learned some excellent techniques for flattening my surfaces and making everything line up, but I kind of love the freedom of making somewhat random shapes like the handle bolsters, much as I loved making the crossguard of my sword: they're three-dimensional affairs that you can really alter at will and aren't as automatic as grinding a blade.  It's very freeing, feeling the weight of it and constantly eying it up and gauging how to get it where you want with a little grinding here and there.

The picture to the right captures an interesting phenomenon that occurred during the heat-treatment of the kard blade: a hardness line that shows the molecular softness of the spine of the blade at the base by the tang, and the hardness of the rest of the blade running diagonally with it and in the rest of the blade.

With all the parts lined up before final finish and assembly, I had again made something that was enough of an object now to give me a start.  This thing is becoming real.  I drew it, I messed around with a bunch of metal, and then now there's this real thing that was just thoughts and two-dimensional drawings.  It was abstract made concrete.  That's magic, if anything is.  I don't think it will ever stop amazing me. 

Inspiring Projects - SCOTT ROUSH // ZEB DEMING Merovignian Langsax

One thing I'd intended to do with this blog that I haven't yet begun was to talk about exciting and inspiring projects and ideas being put out there by other smiths, craftspeople, and artists that I feel both kinship and creative difference with.  I'll try to talk about why I think their work, ideas, and the questions they raise are important for me and how I would like my work to reflect my influences and give credit where it is due.  I'm also just really happy to share the work of talented and passionate individuals, for the amount of inspiration and excitement I get from others is incredibly awesome. 

So basically, I'm going to announce some stuff about other people's projects and provide links and pictures (with permission).  I'll probably talk about my perception of their work overall, hopefully without pigeonholing them, but their voices are strong, and I just wanna get the word out.  Here we go! 



The first project that's been on my mind lately and has made me whistle and say "awww yeaaah" is this excellent Merovingian langsax collaboration between none other than the Michigan iron-smelting maniac Zeb Deming and the Wisconsin blade wizard Scott Roush!

Zeb gazing adoringly at his iron smelting stack.

First the smiths: Zeb Deming is a daring, patient, and talented ironmaker who has taught himself well the methods of bloomery smelting (producing iron from iron ore) and hearth melting (melting iron in a small furnace to carburize/decarburize it at will).  He is also a proficient bladesmith and pattern-welder who has drawn attention to himself though the use of unusual and exciting steels and irons, such as his own bloom steel, hearth steel, and meteoric iron.  Not only do these materials lend his work an indisputable authenticity in fact and in feel, they give his pieces infinite uniqueness, a deeply-imprinted sole-authorship (see this post by Myles Mulkey) and intrinsic story (see this one by me).  He's also an incredibly nice gentleman; "Michigan maniac" only works because of the alliteration. 

Scott with his interpretation of a Norwegian langsax.

Scott Roush, one of the preeminent swordsmiths of the American Midwest, has a style.  Anyone who's seen two of his pieces gets it and won't forget: stark, bold contrasting blade steels; dark, earthy handles with a visceral feel of hand-made and well-used.  From the get-go, he made a deep impression with clever and skilled manipulation of texture and finish.  Recently, he has been breaking new and fascinating ground for himself like a wild man, fearlessly exploring techniques with impressive degrees of success: smelting, wire inlay, carving, and (particularly) casting.  I might add that his blade photography is top notch (considering his already impressive career as a photographer).  I've never met him, but I can say that he's an encouraging presence in the scene and a deeply inspiring fellow!

Now the inspiration: Scott cited the langsax to the left, which is attributed to the Merovignian-era Franks, as the major model for the collaboration, at least as far as blade dimensions, profile, and fittings.  Materials, decoration, and organic fittings were more or less up in the air, and I can honestly say I'm proud of what they're doing with this freedom.



Zeb's steel is so clean and even and yet still so obviously handmade.  A visible grain stretched from hours of folding, but so well refined and homogenized with care and practice.  Another piece of the same steel
has never been made, and no one will ever make steel exactly the same as Zeb's; it's truly as creative a process as the blademaking, but making one's own materials is different than making a piece or even the tools to make a piece.  It's like mixing your own paint from plants; not only are you connecting hands with centuries of people through a material: your hand is occupying the same space, moving with them, learning with them.  Zeb put a piece of his soul in this steel to merge with that of everyone who's ever done the same thing and gained the same knowledge that he has.


Scott has taken it upon himself, in finishing this blade, to bring it to a serious next level of existence.  I have already mentioned Scott's strong and flavorful sense of texture and finish-feel, but I can see that in this blade he is stepping beyond his already palpable style and integrating totally badass technique in a really tasteful and awesome way.  The inlay, first of all, is nothing outrageous or glaringly inauthentic, which seems to follow so often on the heels of skill acquisition.  The pattern clearly does not overstep the feel of the piece, which is a difficult thing to gauge accurately.  Next, it is clean and very well executed, and I really look forward to see Scott's development and use of this technique!


I'm a big fan of choice of materials for this sax, particularly in Scott's use of local native copper (below).  Copper is, to my knowledge, the only metal that occurs naturally in usable quantities, and the fact that he found and is applying this material as it would have been in ancient days is awesome. 

Another interesting element of this piece that shakes the imagination is the inlaid copper element that Scott has cryptically referred to as the 'ellefen head'.  Clearly it's supposed to represent some sort of otherworldly being without any real explanation of who that is or why it's there; however, the mystery of the thing really adds something to the character of the piece for me.  Scott fearlessly adds storytelling (or story-facilitating) elements to his pieces, and I appreciate it.  For more information on the concept of otherworldly visages in period art, see Petr Florianek's post on what he calls the "fierce face" motif.
 
The overall profile of the blade is slim and yet strong.  I'm getting to the part that's so difficult to explain about blades I love when I see them, but goddamn, the lines are right.  Everything about this object screams of a past age to me, or at least a past age of my imagination.  It grabs me by whatever piece of me wants to grab it, examine it from every angle, fall into it.  There's another world in this piece, and Zeb and Scott and dragging it out.