Recently, my gallery has gained a new acquaintance. His name is Kasper, and he does iron age blacksmithing! Now, obviously, without a furnace, he couldn’t work within his trait, but he circled my grandfathers old ambos with a lot of love and asked how silver reacted to being forged. Now, I don’t do MUCH forging – I flatten out wires to achieve that elegant whiplash effect that I always aim for, but apart from that… not so much. At some point I have tried to stretch a piece of silver to become thinner – and failed, wondering how on earth that is done. I can now report that I know!
So, Kasper was given a piece of silver – roughly 6x30 mm and 2 mm thick to play around with.
Kasper has never worked with silver and never so small, so to him it was a real challenge. He had to use far smaller hammers and pliers than usual and get a lot closer. Then again – since the metal isn’t hot when being forged, it’s a lot safer.
And so of he set, creating his specialty: the woman’s knife. It’s a very beautiful tool that every woman who was worth anything, was carrying. He learned a lot about silver and I learned a lot about forging – and also what some of those weird tools that came along with grandfathers anvil was for.
And here we are: a tiny, 3 cm long silver iron age knife, oxidized to get that original, dark look.
Here you see how tiny it is compared with the originals, which are approximately 12 cm long.
I think it’s VERY beautiful, and have suggested that he starts producing more of those knifes – both the real-size in iron and the small silvery one for pendants and sell them on Etsy and Amio. I think he will, eventually, so keep a lookout for Danish iron age knives
