Due to scheduling we left for the Show Friday morning this year instead of Thursday.  Leaving early got us into Portland around 9am, right on schedule.  We then had a detour to go pick up a roughly 2foot by 4 foot by 2.5 inch thick slab of walnut.  This one..

Walnut slab

It was purchased from the nice folks at Jewell Hardwoods.  My quick picture doesn’t do it justice.  There are tan, chocolate and gray colors in the grain and some really nice chatoyant ripples.  I can’t wait to see how it looks as knife handles and to see how it does with the new finish recipe I worked up recently.  I’ll have to do a post on my finish experiments soon.

We got to the show early afternoon, in time for me to enter this knife into the custom competition.

Wrought Iron over 5160 San Mai sub hilt knife

It didn’t win, but there were some very nice knives entered into the competition.  This is the latest collectible knife.  I’ll be getting a page up for it with a better picture and full description in the next couple of weeks and of course it will be with me at Blade.

I also took some Color case hardened Thor’s Hammer pendants and one made out of Wrought Iron.  here they are before jump rings and leather cord.

Thor’s Hammer pendants

They were well received.  I really like doing color case hardening, and plan on doing more knives with color case hardened fittings.

Saturday at the show was really busy, I rarely had more than 10 min at a stretch that I wasn’t  talking to at least one person.  In fact it was so busy it took me an hour to each the sandwich I had for lunch.  Sunday was slower, but that allowed me some time for looking at handle material.  I only actually bought one piece of handle material at the show this year (not counting that walnut), but dang is it a nice piece.  Here it is (on the left, I’ll talk about the bowie blank in a minute):

Fossil walrus and bowie blank

Yup that is a nice little fossilized walrus tusk, that is mineralized really dark.  In the right light portions of it have a blue tint to the black.  It will probably take me a year or two before I get up the courage to cut into it.  The nice thing is that it is a smaller tusk which makes it ideal for the size knives I like to make.

As to the Bowie blank, well it seems I got roped into making one of the award knives for next year.  These are the knives that are given out  as awards for the display tables.  Now I just need to figure out what style to do it in.  I’m torn between walnut with color case hardened fittings and checkering or  Silver plated hollowware in a sculptural form.

We headed back right after the show, which made for a very short trip, but such were the constraints of the schedule this year.  Now time to get a couple orders out and finish the projects for Blade.