#knife day!

[armory-rasa]

Knife day #2 -- this goes a lot faster when you know what you’re doing

Once it had reached a neighborly hour for hammering, I beveled the design:

And man oh MAN, what a difference using good leather makes. Look at that lovely burnishing. 😻😻😻

Experimented with using a seeder stamp to make the background this time:

It’s interesting; I don’t hate it. Reminds me of frog eggs.

Shaping it around the knife over lost a lot of the detail near the fold though. Next time I’ll make sure the tooled parts stay a little further from the spine:

I did some manual touchups to the tooling, and finished the shaping:

Stained it (with Eco-Flo medium brown antiqueing gel, followed by Fiebings dark brown antiqueing paste), gave it a topcoat of resolene:

With the stain, I actually prefer the seeder to the backgrounding texture I used yesterday. I don’t even think it took any longer to do.

Lay down contact cement on inside edges, wait 15 minutes:

Press sides together, decide where you’re going to cut off the excess. I had learned yesterday (but forgotten about, and failed to correct for when I was designing the pattern for this one) that the edge needs more allowance around the handle than the blade, in order to have enough room to fit the rivets, so I widened it out a bit:

Cut off the excess: 

Round & smooth the edges with dremel and sandpaper:

Stained edges and burnished them with tokonole again, then punched my holes. (And set an eyelet into the top, instead of putting two belt loops):

Put in the rest of the rivets and BAM, FINISHED.

and oh my god it is the cutest thing EVER. LOOK AT THIS LITTLE GUY. LOOK HOW PHOTOGENIC HE IS. 😍😍

(I’ll be honest, I’m considering keeping this one for myself instead of selling it.)

So yeah -- sheath all done, and pre-patterning it before molding was a smashing success. I’m looking forward to making more seaxes with knife guy, because I’ve got the sheaths DOWN, my dudes.

[armory-rasa]

today’s project?

So almost all of the previous sheaths I’ve done have been the heavily-welted kind that hang vertically from the belt:

And I do mean heavily welted, because that’s how you make a thick handle lay flush against the sheath. Here’s one that had been in use for a while:

Which is fine when it’s a cute little pocketknife with all of a 4″ blade, but the chonkier the knife gets, the more unwieldy that vertical hang becomes to do things like, oh, sit while wearing them. So as much as I like that style, because it lets me go nuts with the tooling, I decided I should prolly expand my repertoire to include other options.

And after years of selling at renfaires, where my display of knives-in-fancy-sheaths was always an attention-grabber, but not usually what people wound up buying, I did the faire in Las Cruces and inexplicably sold all of them in one day.

Anyway, that’s why I periodically go on aliexpress and buy myself an assortment of all the knives that don’t cost a million dollars and don’t have a jarringly-modern-looking handle. Digging through my closet this morning produced the following options:

I confess, I’m most enamoured with #4, but that looks like another job for a welted sheath (maybe can make it hang diagonally??), so I’ll save that for another day. 

#1 and #2 were the closest I could find to the viking seax style (rounded handle, no guard, blade the same width as the handle), and those were historically worn horizontally, so #1 is what I’m going to play with today. Something like this:

Except, y’know. Fancy. 🤩

So let’s rock!

[armory-rasa]

Knife day! done with attempt #1

Last we left off, I had finished tooling the sheath and molded it into its final shape. Next step was to dye it black:

Applied contact cement all around the edges:

Waited 15 minutes for it to dry, then pressed them together, and gave it another pass with the burnishing rod to get everything shaped right and welded as firmly as possible:

Used a wing divider to trace out a line about 3/8″ from the edge of the blade:

You can see that this pattern should have been given more allowance at the tip, because the curve of the sheath can’t follow the curve of the tooling. (And it should cover more of the knife handle -- when I make this again, I’m going to make it .25″ longer at the tip, and 1.25″ longer at the handle.)

Cut off the excess:

I used an edge beveler to round off the edges, but it was embarrassingly in need of a sharpening, so it didn’t make a very smooth cut. 😅

Hit it with progressively finer grits of sandpaper (100; 225; 500), until the edge was smooth:

Then dyed the edge again, burnished the edge with Tokonole (though you could use gum trag, or saddle soap, or whatever you like), gave it a clear topcoat of resolene, and set rivets at 1″ intervals along the edge:

(Two of those rivets haven’t actually been set yet, because I’m still undecided on how I want to attach the hanging straps.)

SO! POST-GAME ANALYSIS

I’m much happier with this one than I was with the first attempt at a seax sheath. My only real issue is that it’s too short at both ends (the handle end in particular just looks WOEFULLY truncated to my eyes 😖), but it’s not something I’d be embarrassed to sell, so it’ll go on the table next time I’m vending. 

If aliexpress is still selling this particular knife, I think I’ll buy a half-dozen more, so that I can reuse the same pattern to make more such sheaths -- but even if they’re not, this has given me a better sense for how to lay out the designs on a flat pattern, such that they’ll fit a seax sheath once it’s been all folded into shape. 

(Hah, maybe I’ll try patterning a sheath for the smaller seax I’ve got, no trial and error, just seeing whether it works.)

I am still somewhat stymied by how to attach the points for hanging. 🤔 Little metal attachments exist that would be perfect -- if I had any, and/or knew what they’re called so I could search for them on aliexpress. Some people have riveted the leather loops directly to the sheath, but that adds comparatively a lot of bulk at those rivets, which I’m not a fan of. 

Prolly going to poke around on aliexpress, buy more knives, and see if I can find the hardware I want. 

Until next time. 👍👍

[armory-rasa]

Knife day! the seax sheath commences

Taped my blade, because Safety First, and cut a rectangle of ~4 oz veg-tan that is 8.5″x5″. Decided afterward that I should have made it about an inch and a half longer, so that it would cover more of the handle, but whatever.

Soaked it in water a bit, then tossed it outside to dry out some while I patterned out the decorative elements.

Once it had dried out into something workable, I started fitting it around the knife. Used my bookbinding press, because, uh, everyone’s got one of those lying around, yeah? >_> 

(Most people just use a bone folder to get the creases sharp.)

It’s vaguely modeled on a seax sheath found at the Coppergate digsite in York -- I’m not sure how well it’s going to fit around the knife, so I’m not doing a super-accurate version here. If this comes out well, I’ll tweak the next iteration. 

The problem with putting tooling on something molded into weird shapes like this is that you can’t tell exactly where the design needs to be until after you’ve shaped it, at which point it’s a pain in the ass to tool. It’s just... an inconvenient order of operations. 

Anyway, I traced my design onto the blade portion, front and back, and put some on the handle too:

It doesn’t help that this piece of leather isn’t great, so it’s not burnishing well, and it’s hard to see the lines: 

Still not super easy to see, even after carving with a swivel knife:

Beveled them out; slightly better:

Added some outlines and some texture to the background:

I’d considered using a seeder (tiny round stamp), because a lot of extant viking metalwork has background comprised of a lot of dots, but wound up going with the textured backgrounder because it’s easier and it’s what I have more experience with. Good enough for now; might try seeders on a future iteration.

Then I put the knife in it again and clamped everything back in place to let it fully dry:

Next steps are dye + topcoat, glueing the edge, putting in the rivets, and deciding how it’s going to hang.

[armory-rasa]

Knife day! talking about seax sheaths

So I have actually done a seax-style sheath before:

And it was a learning experience from top to bottom. 

First of all, I could not have picked a more inappropriately-shaped knife if I’d tried:

See that trailing point, aka the upward curve at the tip? Means that if you try to jab the knife into the sheath from the wrong angle....

LOL, OOPS. 

And then I just did a mildly shitty job on the tooling, that was exacerbated by getting stretched out when the sheath is folded over, and a really shitty job on the resist (painting the design with a clear substance so it doesn’t take dye as much, and stays lighter than the surrounding background), and then very half-assedly rememberied that people needed some way to be able to carry it, so I put a dangling belt loop on it.

All in all, not my finest work. I can take what I’ve learned and do better.

So, historical seax sheaths tend to look roughly like this:

(Picture unsourced, because fuck you, Pinterest, and this is why YOU SHOULD ALL should be putting watermarks on your stuff, so people can find you when you get reposted without credit on pinterest.)

They hang from the belt (usually at the small of the wearer’s back) from two attachment points, with the blade edge pointing upward. The sheath is made from one piece of leather folded over and molded to fit tightly to the blade and the handle (so that the knife is held snugly in place with friction), and traditionally has metal fittings along the edge. Since I, alas, do not have the wherewithal to do metalworking at home, I’m just going to be using rivets again. 

You could theoretically stitch that edge instead, but that’s not historically-attested, and moreover, in order to keep the blade from slicing straight through your stitching, you would either need to welt it, or put at least one rivet below the tip of the knife. Even the cheap-ass vinyl sheaths that come free with the knives I buy often have a single rivet to protect the seam:

With that out of the way, I am now going to commence with the sheath-fitting.

[armory-rasa]

Knife day 2!

...because I’m still procrastinating on doing my taxes. 🤣

Sadly, the black knife that I made a sheath for yesterday has disappeared off the face of the internet, so I will not get another round to refine that design. Instead, I’ll be attempting to use what I learned yesterday to pattern out a sheath for the itty bitty baby seax before even cutting leather:

Not sure it’s going to give me enough space to do much fancy tooling, but let’s give it a spin. :D