Handcrafted Knife w/ Damascened Blade & Leather Sheath

North America, United States,. A folding knife whose blade carries the swirling contour-map figuring of pattern-welded steel, layers forge-welded and then acid-etched so the alternating strata read as dark and bright currents along the upswept drop-point edge. The grip is built of warm reddish hardwood scales, contoured to the palm and secured with pins and small decorative mosaic rosettes, narrowing to a slim tapered butt. A hooked thumb rise lifts from the blade spine for one-hand opening. Accompanying it is a stitched brown leather belt sheath with contrasting saddle-stitch, a lightly tooled face, and a snap bearing the Great Seal of the State of Oklahoma. Modern American handwork in an idiom that reaches back to historic watered blades, made for the hand as much as for the display case. "Damascus" in the modern knifemaking trade denotes pattern welding: bars of differing steels are stacked, forge-welded, drawn out, folded, and re-welded, sometimes through hundreds of layers, before the finished blade is acid-etched to reveal the interleaved bands. The technique is distinct from the historic wootz crucible steel of South Asia and the Near East, whose watery surface figure arose from carbide banding within a single ingot rather than from layering, and whose production method was effectively lost by the nineteenth century. The revival of pattern welding among American bladesmiths from the 1970s onward, driven by the studio-knife movement and the American Bladesmith Society, made the layered billet a signature of handmade work and put the swirl back into circulation as a mark of craft rather than of origin. The sheath snap carries the Great Seal of the State of Oklahoma, whose central star holds the 1907 date of statehood, the year Oklahoma and Indian Territories were joined and admitted to the Union. The seal's five rays bear the emblems of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole nations around a central device of clasped hands. The date commemorates statehood and is not a date of manufacture; such seal snaps are stock hardware used widely on leather goods of the later twentieth century onward. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids. Item # 199968

Stima:€200.58

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