[Artemisia] Smelting Iron at Uprising

[rayzentz at aim.com]

I, for one, will be there.   Sounds like great fun.



Padruig


-----Original Message-----
From: Catherine Helm-Clark <no1home at onewest.net>
To: artemisia at lists.gallowglass.org
Sent: Fri, 25 May 2007 12:38 pm
Subject: [Artemisia] Smelting Iron at Uprising



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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