[Artemisia] Smelting Iron at Uprising

[Catherine Helm-Clark]

Greetings all and sundry!

Last year, Hachooo Braden and Mst Maire proposed a challenge to the  
Order of the Laurel.  The challenge is for each member of the order  
to bring something to Uprising that is representative of those crafts  
in which we have expertise.  One of the goals of this challenge is to  
encourage and engage the populace in their own endeavors.

A lot of what we do in the SCA is to make finished goods like  
clothes, food, armour, etc.  Now I do some of that, especially  
scribal arts and leatherwork.  Some of my best stuff, however,  
doesn't fall into the "finished goods" categories because what I do  
is make the stuff that finished goods are made of.  For the lack of a  
better word, I've always called this endeavor "Medieval Material  
Science.  I find the raw materials and turn them into useable  
materials.  The problem with this, as I see it, is that medieval  
material science seldom turns out a final product that has any  
"flash" quality.  Frankly, not a lot of folks will appreciate  
something like a black and brown slaggy blob of weird-looking rock- 
like stuff, which is what an iron bloom looks like right out of the  
furnace.  Nor do a lot of folks even get to see the cool-looking  
insides of such a blob - something that I've been privileged to see  
since I cut up one of the first blooms from the Pennsic iron smelting  
group back in 1994 (the insides actually showed the grain structure  
of the iron after I cut and polished a wedge out of the bloom).

So I got to thinking and realized that a lot of the fun of medieval  
material science is actually doing it.  It's the process that engages  
people more often than the end results.  To wit, I decided to present  
the process of making a material as my response to the laurels'  
challenge - and so I am coordinating the construction of a bloomery  
at Uprising.  A bloomery is a type of furnace with which you can  
smelt iron. The blob of slag and iron that comes out of a bloomery is  
called a bloom (I have no idea why it's called that).  The bloom is  
heated and pounded to force the slag out.  The final product of this  
process is wrought iron.

We'll be firing the bloomery and smelting iron in it on Wednesday of  
Uprising.  Come by and visit.

ttfn
Therasia, metal geek