Acorn drink with Chaga

This has been quite a while coming. In the local woods, I came across an abundant supply of Chaga (Innonotus Obliquus, in German: Schiefer Schillerporling), and of course I studied this funghi very, very thoroughly before starting to use it. I knew it were in use in Siberia and Kazakhstan from my Russian mentors, but I did not think it would be growing in our part of the world. Enter climate change, and while this is a sad thing actually, for it ultimately costs the death of a lot of beautiful trees, there is a benefit to be had in harvesting the funghi.

One can faster tell what is not in it. ☺️ Starting with Betulin, Betuline Acids, Polysaccharides, Melanine to organic Vanadium. It is reputed to help with cancer therapy, indigestion, general problems with stomach, liver, kidneys and it supports blood circulation. It is also reputed to help with depressive disorders, and is antibiotic and antiviral. Concoctions of dried and charred Chaga were traditionally used as a wound disinfectant by indigenous people.  Currently there are a lot of medicinal studies by the universities of Moscow and Tokio going on examining the pharmacological properties of the funghus. 

Traditionally Chaga is drunk as tea in Siberia, Finland, the North of Sweden, Norway, Canada, Alaska, as well as China, Tibet and Japan. In the regions where Chaga is drunk on a regular basis, there are very few cases of cancer, which led to the theory that it might be beneficial, so that pharmacological examinations were started. 

Suffering from stomach problems and mild depression I can safely say that I experienced a positive effect by drinking Chaga tea on a regular basis. 

My laid mother used to say "what is bitter for the gums is sweet for your health", and while this still holds true for a lot of implications, it does not fit the bill for Chaga. For it also has a rich vanilla and cocoa flavour. It is indeed a "drink of immortals". 

I like to take one walnut sized piece of Chaga. You have to boil it for at least twenty minutes to dissolve any oxalic acids, which could otherwise cause kidney damage. I add coarsely chopped ginger, one handful of roasted acorns (I look forward to show you how I process acorns in another post), one or two hot chili and three eating spoons cocoa. You can also add one knifetip Tonka beans per litre of water. You can reuse the Chaga up to ten times. If your woods are lucky and not infested with the funghus, you can order it via Web. Just take care that it is harvested wild and in winter. 

I have to add that Chaga is a very potent medicinal funghus. Always use caution when using funghi at all. In the case of Chaga, it is a matter of life and death to boil for at least twenty minutes or use alcohol to make a tincture. I will not take any liability or responsibility for any adverse effects. Use your head.... ☺️ ❤️ 

Other than that, few discoveries I have made have changed my life as much as this humble funghus. It is a fun guy to be around. ☺️ 

Piémontais friction folder

 

This is one of my favourite knives these days. Modelled after a regional knife of the Piémontais in France, aptly dubbed Piémontais or couteau de montagne, I made it from red deer antler, and a simple blade forged from 1.2842 (O2). Selective temper, of course, including the rivet hole, obviously.

The blade has a steel axle that is peened over brass washers. It is a bit tricky to make them right, because you do not have much room for mistakes. But you need very few tools... this one was made with a Victorinox locksmith SAK period. (Apart from the forge, hammer, tongs an angle grinder (before tempering) and a water-based grinding stone. Nothing else. ) 

The friction of the antler keeps the blade in surprisingly well, so good in fact that it actually rides in my pocket every day with not so much of a worry of hurting myself. I like that the design is simple and rugged. it makes it not only reliable, but with but a little practice you could make a handle in the woods with just a SAK. Practice makes perfect, and I love to make those at the moment, so I will keep you posted! Promise! ;-P 

Friction folder with a titanium handle

Long time, no writ, so to say. In the meantime, the world has gone utterly, completely and absolutely mad. M-A-D. Off the rocker. Lost its marbles. Yap. 

Most of you know that, and I could not possibly add to anything that has already been said about that. We will be facing autocrats all over the world, maybe WWIV. Yes, IV. And climate change. And poverty and sickness and decay. Yes. 

Of course I am fucked. Being an artist, as I finally have acknowledged to myself, I will suffer from starvation, neglect or even be manhunted. And time was, I panicked. Been through one or the other ordeal. 

You know what? You know what saved me?

Oh, I think you guessed.... ;-). There are lovely people having me and my smithy, and I could start to forge again. On private ground, with my own tools and my own forge, and for the most part, solitarily, meaning, I can actually concentrate on real progress for myself. Forging outside, in a lovely orchard. Not perfect, and not permanently, and I still have to look for a smithy, but oh so good. It reminds me of the time when I took up smithing, way back then in the garden of my old home by the lake, which is no more. But this is new. 

And when I am forging stuff, there are few things to keep me from focusing on the good work. Meaning, I can make some actual progress, and, focussing helps to keep out all the negative stuff. Just the fire, hammer and anvil. A green orchard, a bit of silence otherwise. Perfect.

This is something I am a bit proud of, even if I still have a lot to learn still. I owe a lot to Fabrice Julien Cognot and master Nobuya Hayashi simply for inspiring me. Same goes for my old friend Joel Delorme, who got me started in the first on wanting to make these folders. I have grown increasingly fond of these. They offer almost the strength of a fixed blade knife, are good to carry around, and they do not scream "combat knife" on top of their lungs... ;-) And it is a dead simple design, which, if made carefully, offer a lot of safety, a surprising amount of it, in fact. 

The all-metal design also is sturdy and resilient to boot. Three parts, no frills.

This is a WIP, of course, not peened over yet, and I have to adjust the handle a bit still. Actually, the handle design is inspired by a knife from the viking age. There are several finds from Novgorod and Birka. As an example, this one might do:(http://users.stlcc.edu/mfuller/NovgorodMetalp.html)

In Birka, there are finds that have the metal handle protrude in front towards the blade, keeping it spring-loaded and thusly in the handle. This works surprisingly well. The knife I am currently making has a titanium handle, which I forged from a round stock of Ti6Al4,5V, which I got on a Marburgian flea market. as I said, the protrusions towards the blade will be adjusted some and will do the job to keep the blade in. If you opened it, the friction in the handle and your hand will serve the purpose to keep it safe. No lock required, and thusly perfectly legal in Germany.

The blade, however, is another novelty for me. I used 1.2842 (O2). I am just beginning to learn the ins and outs of this steel, but as is, it makes for a good compromise between hardness, edge retetntion and flexibility. Of course I gave it a selective temper, including the rivet hole, of course.

Actually, I see this as a beginning of a journey. It feels good to experience a progress, and while I know that this is in no way perfect, I know that another journey just started. And it gives my hands something productive to do and relieves me from code black.

And this , as I hope, is a positive message for my faithful readers around the world. At least, it is for me. The internet is full of the latest bad news and catastrophes, served hot from a press that is meaning no ill but serves its purpose. And there is little we can do. 

What we can, however, is giving our hands something to do. Of course some of you might be confined to your homes, some of you might not be able to get outside or into a shop. But a pencil and some paper, knitting or naalbindning needles, some leather, twine, awl and needles will serve you well, and this is something you can even do in your kitchen or living room. Whatever you do, take your break from the everyday rapidfire of bad news. Give your hands something to do, They are better connected to your heart than your mind can ever be. Don´t try to change things you cannot change. Keep it simple, and put one foot firmly planted upon the earth after the other. One step at a time. And new trails will open. 

Take good care, all of you, and stay healthy!

Death throes of the terror squid - and still I am alive

This is a strange post, stranger even than usual. For the world is a very different place than it was some months ago.

On a private notion, my beloved mother died at the age of 85 on the 8th of December, and that was hard, even though I had time to make my peace with that fact for years. Now I am caring for her partner, who is of not exactly good health, too, and that´s hard.

I lost a lot of so-called friends, too, `nuff said. I lost any opportunity to forge, or craft, or do anything with my hands, in the process, too. I tried to start a business with forging with kids and doing forging tutorials and lectures and stuff... and the lockdown came, and left me with nothing, no chance to earn any money, no funding, no dole, since I have inherited money, which is not worth menitioning, and another inheritance is still in the process, because my cousin died, too. This is an interesting experience.

For I still find my ressilience. I find it in the woods, period. I find it stumpsitting and foraging for food, which has become a matter of actual survival, but it does not matter much. When I can get human food I eat it. When I eat roadkill, that´s also okay. When I dumpster dine, I dumpster dine.

And what is actually happening is, that I seem to be able to put a different perspective on things.

Artists in Germany suffer, and most of them suffer severely, and most existentially. There is actual hunger, and actual need. You can go to holidays, flying in an airplane where you sit shoulder to shoulder for hours on end, but cannot do forging tutorials with more than five people. Medical personnel suffer from fatigue, and while they get a pat on the shoulder, they remain underpaid, and overworked, because it is far more important for the heads of state to sponsor air traffic corporations. Museums, theatres and social insitutions are closed, while big-term automobile corporations get a sponsoring of tax money.

Oh, no, I do not buy into their conspiracy theories, for they are just methods of wagging the dog. Might even be those douchebags are being paid, but I don´t know at all. And I could not care less.

Additionally, and not without some wicked humour, I must say that there´s an idiomatic turn in Germany to classsify someone as exceptionally stupid and raving mad. It goes like "Der hat wohl Lack gesoffen", which translates as "He must have drunk paint stripper". I never thought I had to learn that there some day will be a head of state of whichever country and whatever suggesting we should get rid of a pandemic by drinking Chlorox, disinfectant or paint stripper or shove a torchlight up our arse.

In the meantime, global warming proceeds and rapidly accelerates. we are not facing the anticipated rise in average temperature of 2°C, which would have been bad, but 4°C in all. Look on the UN website, where I got my info. Scientists of the UN fear that with this rapid rise, organized society will fail.

And we fight each other because someone has more pigments than another? We claim we are the chosen ones? Yeah, fight each other as much as you want. Vegans fight vegetarians because they still eat dairy products, and everyone hates each other just because he is first in the queue at the grocery store. Yeah, fight and hate each other as uch as you want.

It actually IS my business, but I do not care. I don´t hate "them", "the others" or "the whites" or "the blacks". I do not even hate the fascists and Nazis of all cultures.

To be frank, this is the end of our civilization. There is no way out of this, since we will not develop new standards of morale, or at least return to the ones we still had in the `80`s or even the `90`s. And 80% of the population will die. Then all will start again, and if enough of us die, maybe the ecosystem will regenerate again, until we rise again to destroy everything again. We could even now change a lot of things, and it would be dead simple.

For we just needed to do less, not more. If we stopped living a life of hate, greed and lust, of madness and the frenzy of still more, more, more, we could calm down and find our resilience.

In survival lore there is an idiom called STOP. This is short for Stop-Think-Orienteer-Plan.

Mankind is in a survival situation. But do we stop and even think? No, we don´t. We run even faster. We buy products we do not need, we cultivate our adipositas and are proud of our incapacity even for everyday challenges. We lack data on the current crisis, but we accelerate even faster.

The fat cats and oligarchs just pour fuel into the fire of our greed and insanity.

I, however, will not put my hand into this chopping mill anymore. Chance is, I will die, and soon. But until then, I will live. And at least try to erase some of the lies I have been force-fed all my life.

There are scandals in the meat industry, and please get me right, even the term "meat industry" is a perversion to start with. I eat meat, and I will continue to do so. Try to kill me for it, but you might not succeed. But the culprit is, okay, we say, so just let´s stop to eat meat and all will be good. And we start to use surrogates, mainly from the soy industry, with one famed corporation at the head of the market, whose explicitly stated  goal is to gain world dominion by dominating the food and crops market. You cannot change this system from within. Putting yourself outside of it, however, seems to be impossible, and, to be honest, most will die, because they are simply not tough enough, have next to no life skills and are utterly dependant on the system. When it collapses, these will whine and get aggressive and die in the process. Capitalism will become more and more totalitarian. We are already seeing the first measures taken. For the fat cats and oligarchs know full well that this system is failing and try to milk as much profit out of it as possible until it is time. They could not care less for the lives of billions. But the good news is that these are the death throes of the leviathan. The Third Reich endured for 16 years. It was hell on earth, and we will live in an even worse hell on earth. But any human societal system will be purged by climatic catastrophes, and we do not have to endure so much longer.  We have some five years until everything starts, give or take one to three.

And, before you get me wrong, I am not an advocate of hoarding weapons and ammo for the apocalypse. Survival will be a matter of what always made humans survive. Even if the system collapses - and might even be there´s still hope - we need ideas and cooperation and resourcefulness far more than firepower. A garden is a more powerful weapon against global warming and hunger, and knowledge a better asset than money. Of course there will be looting and pillaging, and we are faced with the hardest time mankind ever in its history had to face, and there´s a good chance this is the point of our extinction.

There is not much to add to this, and there is no cardinal way to survive this. We had the worst leaders at the worst of times ever. Is there?

There is a reason that in every story and every religion there is one aspect that can save your butt:

Love.

Not flagellant hysteria, not hate, greed and war and violence. Love.

I just want to say: Take care. Care for each other, for your neighbours, for the elderly, for the weak, for those who had bad luck or manoeuvered themselves into a fix. Don´t judge, just lend a hand. And talk. Talk, talk, talk. Learn what the other guy or gal is about. We are all in this together, and we don´t need someone to blame. We need solutions, and we need to live again. For the foundation of our society was what in every philosophy, every story, every myth and every religion on this earth is called the cardinal sins. Don´t expect people to help you, though. Just take care. Simple as that, and don´t panic.