[Artemisia] Smelting Iron at Uprising

[Freydis the Good]

Oooooooo!!!!  Me TOO!!!  (If horse doesn't give birth)

I worked with melting aluminum and casting it in sand WAY back in school.
It was fun and since I'm NOT that great at sewing, this may be something I
could pick up on and get pretty good at.

So, if nature allows it....  I WILL BE THERE!!!


Freydis



On 5/25/07, Catherine Helm-Clark <no1home at onewest.net> wrote:
>
> 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
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