Kitchen cutlery

These are a pair I recently made for my girlfriend's parents as anniversary presents. The veggie chopper, a quasi-Japanese santoku, was my idea and the paring knife was my girlfriend's design. Both blades are forged from steel cut off of a peanut digger blade from my family's farm, differentially hardened in veggie oil (the santoku has a faint hamon that I can't hope to capture with my camera/photography skills), and sharpened to the point where they will shave hair. The bolsters are textured copper scraps left from a baptismal font basin project I'm working on. The handles are a kind of wood called "Texas ebony" which apparantly grows from Laredo on south. Seems like the name "Mexican ebony" would be more accurate, but no one asked me when they named the tree long before my birth



The santoku's handle is faceted, while the paring knife's handle is more organic in shape. The light spots on the wood in the first picture is the sapwood; this second picture shows more what the heartwood looks like. It's some darn tough stuff and didn't like being worked any other way than just grinding it into shape.