Realizations

Note - I think this one was in November 2016 as well.  But it has some pictures!!!

As I was finishing up a knife a couple weeks ago, I realized that I hadn’t finished a knife all year – since the knife show last year in fact. I certainly knew that I hadn’t made much progress, but since I had at least worked on a few, I thought I must have finished one. Then I checked the serial numbers, and found out that I was wrong.  So I proceeded to crank out eight knives.  A couple of them have been in progress for years. 

This batch has a lot of hammer textured spines and carbon scale.  But not on all of them.  Also my first kiridashi, a massive curved machete, a ring knife that I started for the show last year, and a weird skinner of my own design.  There are still another 3-4 that I could probably finish off in a couple days of moderate effort.

And then my pens started selling – before I was expecting anything to happen, and then one of my oldest knives sold! So we ordered a bunch of pen supplies and Erica started listing some of the knives with sheaths.  Have I mentioned that I don’t like making sheaths?  I think that is the real barrier to selling my knives.  They are interesting unique and functional, with (in my opinion) some artistry to them.

So – back to pens.  I spent some time this weekend turning pen blanks – over twenty of them.  And tried some new styles as well – Music Pens; Gearshift pens; Steampunk bolt action; and now I have kits for tops and more wine bottle stoppers and a couple of other things as well.

The day after all the work, I started to itch. I am annoyed.  I wore my fancy dust mask, safety glasses, etc.  I thought I filtered out all of the nasty sawdust from the species that I am allergic too, but I guess I was wrong. I now have my standard systemic rash, but am taking anti-allergy meds to control the symptoms rather than just the hydrocortisone cream.

Some of the pens are coming out well.  The bullet pens are pretty easy and fast.  The Music Pens are pretty unsatisfying and have some quirks – not my favorite.  The Gearshift ones are pretty cool.  The Steampunk are too expensive but are pretty cool.

Right now I am recovering from the allergies.  Not very happy about it.