Sloyd Knives

 If you look over my blog, you'll see that I carve spoons.  My primary tools are a hook knife and a sloyd knife.  Sloyd is a Swedish word for wood crafting.  Essentially, by saying "sloyd knife," I'm saying "wood working knife."  But it is fun to use a foreign word.  

I found out that a teacher and student teacher at my daughter's school are both spoon carvers, too.  Because I want to be extra supportive of teachers right now, I thought it would be good to give them each a new sloyd knife.  (I don't want to get into the whole concern about knives in schools.  There are no students in that school right now, so it isn't a big thing to leave a knife in a wrapped package.)

I made the handles of Alaska birch.  Blades are my usual repurposed spring steel.  It is a good steel and I've been very happy with how it performs in my blades so far.  

Here's a picture of the two knives just before I did the sharpening and stropping.  

As usual, my mark is the rune Wyn/Wunjo (depending on if you use the Anglo Saxon or the Norse name for it).  It looks like an angular P and it makes the sound of a W, so both my initials are there in one mark.  Sort of fun!

Video of the process is also on the way.  As with the blacksmith mini-seaxes, I chose to just make it a music video and play random tunes on my banjo.  If I ever get any feedback from my videos, I'll get some idea of what people like in my YouTube channel.  

Look for the video link tomorrow.