New knife finished!-Capuchadou le original!;-)

Soooo, this is a new one I am quite fond of. It is some 85mm x2,5 mm with quite a shallow blade, made from 240 layers of rebar, spring and file steel, with a selective temper. There is a predecessor of the famed Laguiole folding knife, the Capuchadou native to the French region of Laguiole. While currently there is a folding knife currently marketed as such, peasants of the region carried a small, light fixed-blade knife for all the odd little everyday life of a farmer or shepherd before the venue of the folding knife, which was influenced by the Spanish Navaja. Et Voilá, le Capuchadou...;-). The handle is genuine rose wood, meaning rosa canina wood, which I really love for its wild grain and deep colour nuances. The ferrule is ball-peened copper. The knife has soon become one of my favourite kitchen knives. It is a cinch for dicing onions and vegetables, for cleaning carrots and peeling apples, and a great snack knife, too. I am therefore rethinking my stance towards thick spines in knives. Okay, I would not want to carry a bush beast with a flimsy 1,8 mm spine thickness, but, provided the temper´s right, I guess you can live with thinner even in the woods. Just look at Mora knives... guess there will be more like this one.

Skogsrunar iak minni.

Rummaging through my chaotic drawers and the scrap heaps in my attic-turned-home:-) I came across this relic of a bygone past. This is an old knife I made long ago in my old home in the woods (Alas! This time will never come back:-/), in a happier time when life still made some more sense (might be I was young then and had tiny sorrows and now I am not and have not:-)).

I forged this blade under a starlit winter sky, with the sound of owls hooting and wild deer and pigs rustling in the underbrush. The fox was watching the roaring forge in the twilight, and hare and porcupine and the humble mice and the birds of the night were looking on. I forged this blade as a three-layer laminate out of rebar and file steel, and it was one of my first attempts. Thence there were still pine and spruce and pinion trees swaying in a gentle breeze, before the storm "Kyril" laid them low. The blade was mounted several years ago, however, when I had already left my home near the lake, and I made a handle out of reindeer antler with a simple dragon head carving, a copper ferrule, and a runic inscription with a somewhat "pidgin";-) Old Norse motto: "Skogsrunaminni" should mean: "(I) remember (the) forest´s runes". It should be a talisman against the hellish noise and circumstances I now live in, and so far it has succeeded to keep the memory alive, and always will. Other than that, being selectively tempered in an urine concoction after the "Wein artzt" (17something), it´s a mean cutter, too. I still like it, and I will make a new sheath for it. The knife and its message deserve it.