Festival of The Rose

Blacksmiths Demo

Held on 02/02/2002 at Cal-Tech in Pasadena, CA

This page last updated on 02/06/2002

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    On February 2nd, 2002, the SCA's Kingdom of Caid and the Barony of Angels held an event to honor Her Royal Majesty, Queen Catalina Oro Sol. This event was held to honor her patronage of the arts. As such it was a day for demos and displays by SCA artisans. Besides the static art displays (of which were many an excellent example), there were a number of SCA arts demo area's. There was spinning and a scribes demo, that I can recall (and others that I forget, I'm sure). But this report concerns the blacksmithing demo, that I took part in.

    The morning of the event dawn a little warmer then the prior week, which seemed like a good thing at the time. However, it would come back to haunt us later in the day. Having spent the night before packing all my forge gear, my lady wife and I got a later then usual start that morning. We arrived on site. only to find Master Damales pulling up, directly ahead of us. Once the event steward, THL Honoree, showed where we were at, we commenced the job of setting up. Now Mater Damales, is a farrier in real life. So his equipment travels from site to site in his truck. His set up went pretty quick. My set up, on the other hand took a little longer. We had to unload maybe 300 to 400 pounds of gear and set it up. However, we didn't need to leave the van in the forge area, so there was a payoff for the extra work. You can see an overhead shot of the forge area while we were still setting up, below. After this photo was taken, Jarad and Selene loaned us the use of their extra large pop-up shade pavilion, which turned out to be life saver later in the day.

    While I was setting up my gear Master Damales was repairing the hinges on one of the royal foot stools. That's him working at my post vise. I'm the guy in the WAY too colorful shirt to the left.

    The round tables in front were used to hold samples, books and handouts. Later we added caution tape across the front legs of the tables, to form a safety perimeter.

   Once court was over we started to work for real. I worked in welded cable and made a spoon. Master Oso formed the basis for a knife in high carbon steel and Master Damales worked in wrought iron. We kept a steady crowd in front of us for almost four hours.

   After it was all over, it was time to pack it all back up again. So come the end of the day, I was very tired, but also very happy. I would like to thank the event stewards, Master Oso and Mast Damales for all thier help. I would also like to thank Senor Andre and Ursula Messerschmitt for the use of the photos. This is something that I will certainly do again at a future event. So if you would like to see this at your event, please contact me to see if we can set it up.

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