If I have any readers, other than myself, you are probably in the SCA and by now lamenting the fact that everything has been shut down.  We were going to kick off the opening of the Kingdom in the beginning of August with my Barony of Twin Moon’s annual Middle East Feast, but due to Arizona becoming a major hot spot for COVID (aka we opened up too soon) we had to cancel our event.

During our time in isolation I did a few things…finished up the Queen’s Graces and the Commander of the Queen’s Grace and made a Seax (along with a sheath for it).  I also have read two books (“The Great Siege of Malta 1565” by Ernle Bradford and “1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West” by Roger Crowley.  Moving on from those two, I have started reading two more books (“Gods and Myths of Northern Europe” by H.R. Ellis Davidson and “The Last Battle” by Stephen Harding).  Once I have completed those, I plan on purchasing “The Accursed Tower” by Roger Crowley for my future readings.  I am also looking at a few books about medicinal plants as well as roadside geology of Colorado and New Mexico.  I do have a rather wide range of topics I like to read about (I got that from my father, who in his retirement is driving my mother crazy with the amount of books he had read and has stacked around the house.  She swears he is trying to kill her with those stacks).

For Father’s Day and my birthday, my wife gifted me with a manual industrial strength leather sewing machine.  Since it is a knock off on an old Singer sewing machine, made in China, it is covered in oil and requires some TLC before I can start using it.  It does work and it has good reviews on Amazon and I have several projects I am thinking about.

I am also reviewing several wood working blog and YouTube sites since I have a desire to make medieval furniture…mainly boxes.  And finally, I play Elder Scrolls Online…which is were I spend a lot of my free time.

Despite all of that motivated sounding stuff, I have had the Lion of Atenveldt scroll sitting on my art table for the last 3 months and cannot bring myself to complete it.  I have it all laid out in my head but the motivation is not there.  I also feel that my time in the SCA is coming to an end.  There a personal and political reasons for my feelings on this but end goals are not being met and my time could be better spent.  Maybe I will go, maybe I wont…we will see after this whole COVID thing passes.

* I am going to edit this post soon to include some pictures and links.

I also do a little blacksmithing and find it a bit cathartic to beat metal into the shape you want…if not also physically demanding.  My first official project was HRM Morgan’s Kings Sigil.  I worked with Master Bran Padrig (SCA, Kingdom of Atenveldt) and after helping me with the first two troll crosses, he turned me loose with minimal supervision and I completed a total of 21 crosses.  My next project (which spanned a year) was the making of a forging hammer in the style of the Mästermyr find.  After that, I did not do much more beyond that (I did make a set of crucible tongs and a set of flat tongs…which is now my main set of tongs) until now.

When I first built my two burner forge, the burner manufacture lost my order and delayed it by about a month.  As a bit of recompense, he gave me 3 bars of 1080 steel.  I knew I wanted to make a seax, but trying to figure out what type was another issue.  I am not sure what type it exactly is and it may be more of “in the style of” as opposed to “recreated or duplicated”.  Either way, I am happy with my progress and hopefully this will push me to continue since I do have a desire to do more with smithing.

The blade is approximately  4.5 inches long with a 4 inch long tang.  I plan on making the tang a bit longer so that I can extend it through the handle and peen the excess over to secure the handle in place.

I didn’t get any before pictures like I did with my other projects, but the picture above and the next one are after my initial forging and now I am cleaning them up with my belt sander.  The dark marks are hammer marks where I attempted to lengthen the blade a bit.

The next two pictures show more clean up:

On the bottom picture I have taken a marker and drawn where I want to work on the shoulder, rounding it out and making it more even.  I will draw the tang out a bit and straighten everything out.  After I am happy with the tang, I am going to go back and work on the blade geometry a bit.  Overall I am happy with the geometry, but I think I am going to make a little wood jig to hold the blade at a consistent angle.

Once I am happy with everything, I am going to heat the blade up to a cherry red and shove it in vermiculite in order to normalize the blade.  After than I will heat it back up to a cherry red (I will have a magnet handy to try the magnet test) and quench the blade.  With any luck, my blade will be hardened otherwise, I will try it again.  Once done with the quenching I will temper twice, both times at 400 degrees F for 2 hours.

This is the overall plan for the finished look:

After I finish the blade I have a few friends that do leather working so I will probably hit them up and have them help me make an appropriate sheath.

More pictures as I progress…

Queen’s Grace #2 (technically the 3rd, since I received the first one but did not make the scroll) for the 4th reign of HRM Elizabeth has been given out.  There was a little mishap with the cleaning of the flux, which caused some of the ink to run.  Luckily it was just the lettering and not the artwork.  The woman who is making the stained glass boxes is working on a new approach to cleaning the flux off and protecting the scroll.

As I progress, I try to throw in something new or improve upon my technique.  With this in mind, the final scroll (The Commander of the Queen’s Grace) should be the best piece out of all of them.  In some cases also try to match the scroll to the person receiving it; whether it be their arms colours, favorite colours, personal heraldry or something that clearly identifies it with that person.

I slowed down again, lost the inspiration and didn’t do too much in the way of making scrolls despite there being a need.  And then Her Grace Elizabeth stepped up for her 4th reign.  She wanted to something big and different so her apprentice came up with the idea of a stained glass box and a scroll.  I was asked to create the scrolls again so who was I to turn down a friends request.

I did have a few scrolls that I got out during my “down time” (I forgot to take pictures of them and now I have to hunt them down) and I have been doing other crafty things.

More later, but for now, enjoy what I and Ashley Finnel (aka Irisko Aranyas in the SCA) have created…