My latest piece of smithing work and some writing news.
Dinky Knife
If you’re on Facebook (my profile: [External Link]) or Twitter (ditto: [External Link]) you may have already seen other photos of the dinky knife displayed on the left. It isn’t sharp, was never intended to be and is only about 5cm long in real life. I have a thing about the curved handle / tang of the medieval pattern that this and a previous not-knife were based on. Expect to see more of them over time. One day, I will make the perfect knife-shaped pendant!
This one is wrought iron pattern-welded with hardened steel (a farrier’s rasp, in fact). The pattern-welding was probably the most time consuming part taking a couple of hours, not including breaks. The shaping of the tang only took about half an hour and the polishing and final shaping of the blade were maybe an hour. The more practised guys at Cold Hanworth Forge [External Link] can probably do it in an hour and a half.
I confess I had originally intended to work on something more impressive – or at least longer. I hope to one day make my own training blades and need to work on drawing metal out longer and learning more about the suitable kind of metals. But we wimped out and decided to work on one of my other metalworking obsession, instead. (The other one is flowers, by the way, and I should be learning how to make roses on my next visit.)
My writing is actually a lack of update. Specifically, I’ve removed what I had labelled as World: The Virtues [currently tagged as the “Virtuous World” – JT 30/09/2011] from the site, along with the 7 stories I had posted here. That particular set of ideas has been mothballed. It may be resurrected at a later date. I am working on some new flash fiction for the site, though, so expect to see that some time in March.
While I’m mentioning future updates, some of you may also have noticed that promised genealogy updates haven’t appeared. There are some changes to be made to CHARLESWORTH, CUTTS and TABERNER families but I’m taking my time over them. In the main it’s minor additions of individuals and dates so it shouldn’t change the structures much. The updates will appear eventually.