En Garde! – Wooden Sword

En Garde! For this week’s learning project post I had the urge to carve a wooden sword. I’m not exactly sure why, but I wanted to and did it. Unfortunately, there was not lots of available sources that were carving what I wqas looking for. All of the videos of wooden swords are big life sized swords. That is not what I was looking to do. I wanted to carve a small one as that is what my learning project is. Eventually, I came across this video that had the shape I was looking for, just an inflated size, so I used the video more as inspiration for my project.

I basically used the video to see the shape of the sword and how they connected the cross guard and handle with the blade. I couldn’t follow the video step by step since it was a different process, but nevertheless its was beneficial to see how this one was done. It led me to the creation of my sword, shown below:

My sword came out pretty good I think. The handle is loose as I chipped it a little bit. The thickness of the sword was not a lot so once I was working on the finer details it was easy to cut too much and make silly mistakes. When I was carving the blade I had to hold the handle in my hand which was the reason for it being loose. As i held the sword my grip would get too strong and snap some of the handle. That was the biggest issue with this project. The weirdest thing about this project was that I didn’t want smooth edges on the blade. With every other project I have done I have tried to get it as smooth as possible. When I made the blade smooth it just looked weird. I wanted the roughness as that would make it look like a sword and give the blade definition. I had to shave down a lot more of the sword, but since I did it it was much rougher and had definition. It looked way better. That was kind of a key moment for me as I realized not everything is supposed to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be perfectly smooth. In fact, it looks better when you can tell its hand-made. It keeps it authentic. Overall this project was an easier difficulty, but I feel that I learned the most from completing it