Cheetah knife done!

What a thrill to see this completed, and professionally photographed!



This was an awesome collaboration, and I'm thrilled with how this turned out. Hats off to Kirby Bletcher for a fine looking knife, and Chris Malouf for the gorgeous engraving and inlay. Chris and I are sharing a table at Blade Show, so this knife of course will be the centerpiece! Woo hoo! I'm soooo excited about this show! :-)

Cheetah Knife sneak preview!

The Cheetah Knife is done and will be back in the hands of the engraver tomorrow. He'll finish the engraving on the back, and then it'll go off to be professionally photographed. I won't show you the whole knife until I get that photo (trust me, it looks AWESOME) but here's a little peek at how the scrimshaw turned out:

Last you saw, it was B/W:

Some color to spice things up a little:

Ooh la la!:

March 3 work in progress

Oh yeah, now we're gettin' somewhere! :-)


In other news, it hailed this afternoon. Earlier in the day it was sunny and pleasant, and then it turned super cold and little balls of ice fell from the sky. I am overwhelmed by the urge to say "What the hail!"

Here's a teaser closeup of the engraving practice that I'm doing. This part is about 3/8 of an inch tall. What might surprise you is the fact that these would not be considered particularly fine small cuts. That's actually deliberate. I set out to work kinda "big" just to get a better feel for handling gravers. Of course, when it comes to engraving, even "big" is pretty small ;-)

March 1 work in progress: Cheetah Knife

I know, I know, it's not at a very attractive stopping point, the inner border line isn't even done but I'm tired. Doing the image transfer for the cheetah took so flippin' long! Borders and transfers make me hold my breath and grit my teeth. It's pretty smooth sailing after that!

I am also putting a lot of time on my metal engraving practice. Fiddling around with practice plates just wasn't working for me, so I'm engraving a key fob and learning SO MUCH in the process. Wow. Creating an actual image, a real project, works sooooo much better for me than scratching randomly at practice plates. It's full of mistakes, I don't care, I am learning so much and improving so much as I go. I'm trying all sorts of different gravers, finding that I like some and hate some. I definitely plan to ink it when I'm done. I know there are plenty of purists out there who don't believe engravings ought to be blackened but I'm afraid I'm not one of them. I figure if I spend that much time on something I'd like to be able to see it from all angles. At least, that's my theory of the moment. My theories are subject to change without notice.

I'll show you what I'm doing when I'm done. With lots of disclaimers about it, and how it's my first non-bulino-dot engraving. Oh yeah, that's the other challenge. I am not allowing myself to use dots. Dots are easy, so I have to use lines instead. :-)

February 27 work in progress: Cheetah Knife

I have the opportunity to do another collaboration! This is going to be a great piece. I've been asked to keep this somewhat under wraps while I'm working on it. So, I will show you some work in progress stuff but won't unveil the finished piece until it's been professionally photographed.

This is the knife I get to work on. As you can see, it's pretty small, and gorgeous!. It was made by Kirby Bletcher and engraved by Christopher Malouf. I will be scrimming a cheetah on the handle, which is pre-ban elephant ivory.

First step was to get the first line of the border on there, which was SO grueling because this knife has curved edges, so measuring was quite a challenge, and I needed to match my border with the one that's engraved onto the bolster. My border will mirror the engraved one... two thin black lines with gold in the center. I think the cheetah is going to be the easy part. ;-) I know, you're looking at this and you're not impressed. That's okay. Just wait. And ignore those little ink smudges.