Andrew Jordan Functional Art

I started my bladesmith training when I was very young. My father and grandfather both made blades. I have carried on with my family's bladesmithing tradition. I went to Japan for 2 years studying under a 'mukansa' bladesmith. For the last 20 years, I have been a full-time bladesmith. The knives you see on the website are all delivered to my clients over this time. All the blades are made using traditional techniques, hand forging and hand skills are used in the making of the blades. A lot of time has been spent in developing these skills and still are being developed and accessed on a continuous basis. It is my aim to deliver the most up to date design that is a tool that functions. You can be assured that I use accurate forging techniques and hardening and tempering cycles in the production of your blades. I make both forged blades and production blades. Careful attention to detail is always necessary for making any kind of custom item. A knife is so much more then it first appears to be. The unity of the design, the carefully carried out craftsmanship all come together in a form of a knife. There is a feeling you have with a knife. If it is well executed, well balanced it has this feeling of completeness. Some may call this a spirit. I suppose it is the aim of any craftsman to imbue the object he makes with some kind of spirit. We can all be sold things by clever advertising and marketing, more frequently than not these days with these mass produced items they rarely come up to the advertising marketing hype which sells them. This is a sad thing of our modern age. You can rest assured that in the case of ordering a custom knife from myself the knives I make are extensively tested in it's making together with field testing. Looking at indigenous people like the Sami in Finland and the bushmen in the Kalahari, they normally carry two knives when in the field. A larger primary knife and a smaller secondary. This I have seen and taken into account in my functional art: all my knives come in a pair, a primary and secondary knife. You can see this in all knife pictures on the website with each knife combined with a smaller skeleton knife. This has proven to be a very good combination in the field for covering large areas of tasking skills.