Forging on
I've been meaning to post this for almost a month - March and April and June (WTF!? Why haven't I posted this yet!?) have come and gone and left us dazed and blinking in the finally warm sun.I've had a tough couple of months, notably because I hurt my knee in a freak occurrence of IDon'tKnowWhat. Much more on this at some point. But it started off well - because the first Sunday of March found my Dad and I engaged in some seriously kickass father-daughter bonding...by way of the hammer! We took a beginner blacksmithing course! *Erika beams and strikes another item off the bucket list* I've been wanting to learn about blacksmithing for pretty much my whole life. Don't believe me? Please. I'm serious. Don't question the chick with the hammer... Back when we were kids, my parents would take us on a yearly family outing to Upper Canada Village in Morrisburg, a beautifully recreated village from 1867, complete with working mill, farms and stables, gardens and costumed townsfolk going about a typical day's business. It was a nerdy, crafty girl's epic dream: wool carding! yarn spinning! bread baking! sheep! goats! drawing on slates in the schoolhouse! trying to quilt with grouchy ladies who criticize my stitching! I'm slightly embarrassed about the degree of enthusiasm I'm experiencing over these memories, but it was always fun (even when I was a petulant teenager.) My Dad, who grew up on a (albeit far more modern) small, rural farm would always tell us a story or two from his childhood, often prompted by some of the tableaus that we'd walk through, and I always quietly appreciated the perspective on his life before he was grown, married, a dad. When you're a kid, you seldom think about how your parents were people like you, before they had you. I digress, as usual. The very best part of the day was THE BLACKSMITH. I kinda had fight the urge to make rock-on fingers while I typed that (it would've resulted in a grave misspelling like YDAST KBLAKDRJMITAJK! or something.) The blacksmith Dude (always abiding, always bearded...is there any other way?) would be covered in soot, burn marks sprayed up his clothing, sweat trickling down his face, smudgy and streaked. The forge was as hot as hell, with thick smoke billowing out, noise and spark and might high on the air. I loved it. Watching the blacksmith's (always enormous) hands wield a crude hammer like his life depended on it blew me away. every. single. year. The guys who manned the forge (and it was always guys, which totally pissed me off, but they were trying to portray an accurate depiction of life in the 1800's after all) would produce the simple, elegant shapes of everyday necessities: horse shoes (perfectly curved, every time) nails and stakes, pot stands and farm implements. Occasionally an artwork, a candle holder, a garden ornament. I'd watch them until the heat of the place almost had me, and then I'd stay and watch some more. The steps seemed pretty simple: heat the metal until dangerously red, smash the metal with a hammer. Repeat. As my jewelry skills have slowly grown over the years, I've been honing my mini-hammer skills to become faster, more precise. I work at a tiny anvil. I anneal the metal to red, let it cool to black, hammer with abandon. I have ruined a lot of perfectly good silver ($fuck$) practicing my hammering. I love the look of hammered metal, and it's creeping into my work more and more. I'm not fighting it. So when my parents told me of a blacksmithing course taking place in Wakefield on a weekend when I was planning a visit home, I registered immediately (not even knowing how I was going to pay for it, really.) To ice the cake with even more awesome, my Dad decided he was going to try it out too. I believe my response when Mom told me his decision was something along the lines of AWWWW HELLS YEAH! Never one for expressing my delight delicately...
On to the forge. We drove north in the Edelweiss valley to the Kinghorn Forge,
where we met Michael King Horn and the other participant in the workshop, a friendly guy named Doug. Michael's skills with metal are jaw-dropping. He's been working as a blacksmith for (I think) 15+ years, and his dedication and obsession with his craft is inspiring. He threw us right into the thick of it, minutes after arriving we were wearing heavy leather aprons and gloves up to the elbow, squatting around the floor of the workshop getting a quick lesson on drawing out the steel, by drawing on the floor with chalk.
I appreciated that there was minimal talk about safety upfront, it's refreshing to have common sense expected of you in a learning environment (zing. take that society...) Rather, he was pretty straightforward on how to work quickly and safely while we were in the thick of it. I learn better this way, and I mean really, the metal is 2000 degrees F when it comes out of the forge. DON'T FUCKING TOUCH IT. The end.
I was given an anvil (a big fucking anvil, all beaten to hell and venerable looking) and handed a 4lb sledge. Oh hai, very heavy thing that I'm not used to wielding. I suddenly felt like I had something to prove to myself...you talk big, girlie, but can you handle it? After heating our metal in the forge (an elegantly simple propane-powered dragon's maw at 2200 degrees F) we were shown how to grasp it with tongs, squelch it long enough to cool the metal enough to be able to hold it with our gloves, and how to transport it safely to the nearest waiting anvil (like walking with a flaming sword!! "Coming through people, WITH A BIG FLAMING SWORD!"...sorry, again with the nerd girl fantasy...)
Drawing the steel out was easily the most challenging, and it was the first technique we learned. Precisely aimed hammer blows, with precise weight of impact, with quick and repetitive repositioning of a red-hot piece of metal in a space of about 45 seconds...whew. After about 45 seconds, the steel would cool to the point of being unworkable, so back into the fire it goes - you start again in 2 mins. Within an hour, I was very aware of my grip and arm muscles, or serious lack thereof. Michael suggested that I should lose the glove on my right (hammering) hand - suddenly things were easier, my grip no longer compromised by acres of leather between my fingers. I knew with one uncovered hand I needed to be more aware of the heat, but for the most part I was comfortable moving from the heat of the forge to the cool around the anvils, and I felt brave and savvy handling the steel straight out of the heat. My remaining glove got a bit damp after 2 hours of work (from grasping the metal when it was fresh out of the squelching barrel) and at one point it got VERY hot, VERY fast as I was moving some of the metal around in the forge. I felt the moisture against my fingers suddenly start to vaporize, so I simply let the metal I had in my grip drop to the floor, and in one swift move, dropped the glove off my hand right away. Minor steam burn, who cares, let's keep hammering!
While resting my freshly steamed hand, I spent some time watching my Dad. Dad built my childhood home from a plan and wood, so you might say he is very skilled with tools and manual labour where precision is key. I don't understand how this occurs, how people build houses or parts of houses or know how inherently how to fix things. It's the kind of practicality that I dream of, but I'm such a spaz I'm not sure I could be a contender. I can't bend my head around how he even knew where to start with a project so complex...how do you even?...but my Dad has an uncanny sense of project planning. That is a quality that I don't really feel that I have on a large scale, but it is a skill that I hope to develop, and there is no doubt in my mind that my need and love of making things came from my Dad. I hope to be cool enough to build a house someday. Actually, I just hope I get to be even half as cool as my Dad someday...
Again, digressing. Because of his life-honed skill, I watched Dad as he landed precise blow after precise blow and studied his posture, his arm positioning and his stance. Hip against the anvil, higher elbow. Got it. Back to the anvil, I pressed my right hip against it, leaned more over the entire surface and held my steel rod at a higher angle than I had previously. BOOM. I levelled up - found the sweet spot that the higher angling produced, discovered how my precision increased if I actually listened to the hammer blows instead of overly directing them, and found some more power and comfort in sidling up to the anvil. These gains helped me ignore the pain, 'cause this was damn hard work.
After about an hour of practicing our hammering and drawing out, Dad and I decided to make candle holders as our project for the remainder of the workshop. Doug chose to make some garden stakes. The main technique that we'd be using for the candle holders was called scrolling - literally, rolling the metal up into a loose spiral (vs. the jelly roll, where the metal is coiled tightly around itself.) I was excited to see how different this technique would be from how I scroll wire when I'm working with silver. It wasn't all that different, only the metal is bigger, hotter, and you don't use pliers. You use a hammer to curl the metal, with traveling strikes and lever-like handling. It's beyond intuitive - if you understand how the metal reacts at different heats, it communicates to you where it needs to be struck. I can't say the metal and I were on the same wave-length at first, but with Michael's help I was able to start picking up what the steel was throwing down. The huge, metal equivalent of bench pins were affixed to one of the anvils to create a sort of jig; the steel could be wedged, red-hot, between the pins and curled by pulling it toward you. This was so similar to working with wire that I understood it almost immediately. We were given about an hour and a half (give or take) to draw out the ends of two pieces of 1" wide, .25" thick steel bars, and then curl 2/3 of their total length into 2 scrolls. Aim for perfection, or aim for beautiful, obvious imperfection Michael told me. I think about that statement quite a bit now. I produced one very good spiral, and one very funky one. Disappointed with my less than perfect second (I had rushed at the jig, I rushed the very part of the process that I actually really knew how to do... :-/ ) Michael said he preferred it for the simple reason that it was just funky, it wasn't trying to be anything but itself. Cool. Am I suddenly training with the Zen master of Blacksmithing...?
Using an insane metal punch earlier in the day (wish I had seen it!) Michael had cut 2 discs each from .25" steel; these were about 3" in diameter and were to be the candle cups for our candle holders. The were heated in the kiln, and then quickly dropped into a giant doming block, where we were to dome them into submission (or at least into a nice shallow bowl.) Now here's something I can do! Almost exactly the same as doming silver, only it needed 3 reheats and you had to guard the hell out of it as you were hammering to ensure that a tiny, red-hot frisbee didn't suddenly jump up and bite you! It was challenge enough dodging the fragments of metal scale that burst off the surface of the steel while you were hammering - literally the outer skin of the steel as it cooled would flake and fly off when hit. I must've had at least 6 pieces of scale hit me directly in the face during the afternoon - tiny tiny pin pricks of heat as they impacted and cooled at the same moment. Eye wear is a must. Hammering furiously as the metal buckles and scales at you makes you feel like the biggest badass ever, just fyi.
Doug's project showed us a few other tricks. He was making decorative garden stakes, and opted to design a twist into each one. Again, the steel was heated red hot, then slammed into a vice and fitted with a curious wrench-handle-thing that Michael had hacked from the a big wrench by adding another handle coming off the head. Trust me on this. Affixed to the steel, it looked like a propeller, and that was exactly how it was supposed to move. The two ended wrench made it possible to twist the steel while it was held fast in the vice. About 6-8 rotations made a beautiful, even twist running about 5" along the stake. It was a very cool thing to try my hand at (thanks to Doug for allowing us a go at it, on his project! Go team!) Again, all this took place in the space of about a minute, so getting the placement of the steel into the vice and wrench quickly and properly was paramount. Doug also had a chance to use the robot hammer! I mean, the hydraulic hammer, which is...a crazy fucking machine that hammers the crap out of anything you put into it with the force of 96 planetary collisions....or something like that. I can't even explain what it looked like, but it was loud, fast, scary, and enormously useful! Michael explained that it was a well-appreciated short-cut when doing constructions that had lots of fairly identical pieces in them - it cut down on the production time, and more importantly, the wear on him as he was producing large-scale projects (like staircase bannisters, for example.)
With the two pieces of our project (the spirals and the candle cups) complete, all that was left to do was weld the two together - which Michael did for us with a MIG welder...another cool tool that I got to see in action. We donned welders masks so that we could watch safely (I may have pretended I was a member of Daft Punk for a moment, quietly, to myself...) and with a lightning flash and the most insane crackle-snap of electricity, the deed was done. I appreciated getting to see that process; I really love learning about metalwork, and because I know just a small bit of it I'm always super excited to see some new form. Also, when I was in high school, you know, IN THE EARLY (19)90'S, my douchebag shop class teacher wouldn't let the girls handle the 'hot' tools, meaning anything powered by electricity, gas or otherwise. Fucker. I spent a lot of that class sitting out in the hall for insubordination (aka: demanding my rights as a free citizen...) So any chance I get...
DIGRESSING. With anger. It's what I do.
3.5 hours later, it was all over. It went. So. Fast. Suddenly we were collecting our pieces, picking our arms up off the floor, and weakly shaking hands with Michael. Both my Dad and I were really satisfied with the workshop, and deeply humbled to realize how physically demanding the work was, and, comparatively, how physically undemanding our lives had become. My Dad extensively cares for about 2 acres of land, a large house and 2 large dogs with no complaint, on a daily basis. He is in great shape, strong as an ox, and even he felt the same as his daughter who lazes in an office chair tapping away with t-rex arms on a computer 8 hours a day and more. I was a leaden-armed zombie for 2 days after...it's always the day after the day after that does it. The tendons in my wrist stiffened into cables and the muscles in my forearms felt like they had turned to stone and separated from the bones. I felt like an Ikea version of myself, put together by drunken freshmen.
But I was hooked. HOOKED. Since then, it's been on my mind like an addiction and I need another hit (ha! Puns!) I haven't been at the (big) anvil since the workshop in March, but I have been reading, researching, and bringing the approaches that learned at Kinghorn forge to my little studio bench. I have found another forge closer to my home where I might be able to study, and I am planning another trip back to Kinghorn as soon as possible. I feel a new path stretching ahead of me. Concerning my own work, I genuinely love the pieces that I make that harken to the blacksmithing aesthetic. And I genuinely love the cuts, burns, smashed fingers and ruined metal that I've sustained, because it means I'm making in a really genuine way.
If you are in or plan to be in the Ottawa area, and you are looking for a kickass experience, I can't say enough about Michael and his workshops. Please visit his site for more info, and to discover his incredible work.
I have more to say on this 'making genuinely' subject, but I don't have all the words just yet. The long and the short of it is that I had my heart broken with disappointment and then patched up with clarity about a month ago in the space of 12 hours, and while the revelation was lightning-bolt quick the adjustment has been gradual. I'm a lucky girl to have experienced it the way I did. So, more on that when I find my words (and my inside voice...)
