BLADE Staff

Knife Skills Movie Nominated for Oscar Award

Knife Skills is a documentary about an upscale restaurant staffed by people fresh out of prison with zero culinary experience. It’s not a knife movie like the ones BLADE normally covers, but blades do play an important role. 

On the knife front, the larger point to be made is about the intentions behind the use of a knife. Here is a group of people with serious criminal records. In another context, that could be dicey, but here it isn’t. It takes the air out of arguments for regulating knives according to specs.

Knife Skills also shows how knives can create collaborative spaces for the sake of art, business or leisure. Can a restaurant function without knives? Why do the best chefs on Earth also seek the best knives? You can’t separate food and people so long as there is a tool with a cutting edge, and that means knives. The relationship is so essential that even convicts can be trusted to preserve it.

The documentary caught the attention of more than just BLADE, too. It received a 2018 Oscar nomination. We’ll see if a knife movie brings home the big award on March 4, when the awards ceremony takes place.

Knife Skills didn’t hit theaters in a wide release, but you can stream it on Amazon Prime for a couple bucks.

Heads up: The trailer above contains some coarse language. 

Happy 30th Birthday, Outdoor Edge

Denver-based Outdoor Edge turned 30 years old last month, which means it’s still clinging to the spirit of its 20s but contemplating middle age while holding down a mortgage and a couple kids. (In lieu of a birthday card, BLADE respectfully submits that joke.)

Outdoor Edge won a BLADE Magazine Knife Of The Year® in its debut year at the 1988 BLADE Show in Knoxville, Tennessee, with the Game Skinner. As BLADE‘s Steve Shackleford points out, that went on to be one of the most knocked off knives ever. No good deed goes unpunished, I guess.

Less copied is the way Outdoor Edge got its start, simply because it’s so challenging to build a knife company from the ground up. From its news release:

From its humble beginnings as a one-man show with four prototype samples, [David] Bloch’s company, Outdoor Edge, has grown significantly in the past thirty years. Currently, the company has 24 employees and offers more than 120 products. Originally based in Boulder, Colorado, the company moved to a larger facility in Denver in 2010.

BLADE wishes Outdoors Edge 30 more great years of success! 

New York Times: Knives Make Excellent Gifts

For being based on an island that prosecutes electricians for carrying pocketknives on the job, this is a refreshing change of pace for the Gray Lady. A NYT article about gift registries favors knives and knife accessories as foolproof (and inexpensive) options.

Who can blame them? If you have a kitchen, you’ll use a knife. Heck, even if you don’t have a kitchen, you’ll probably use a knife at some point. 

From the article:

Choose a few high-quality knives instead of a knife block set, as sets tend to have a lot of filler knives that you don’t need. Wirecutter suggests three different knives for the average cook: chef’s knife, paring knife and serrated knife.

Throw in a cutting board while you’re at it, too.

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Bear & Son Cutlery Plans Expansion

Who says domestic knife manufacturing is dying? Alabama-based knife company Bear & Son Cutlery will grow its Jacksonville facility and add new jobs. From The Anniston Star:

Bear & Son Cutlery in Jacksonville plans to take a stab at expanding production and adding more jobs.

The knife manufacturer expects to buy equipment and hire around 25 people over the next two years to meet growing customer demand.

Assisting with the expansion is a local tax abatement, as well as a generous knife pun on behalf of the Star.

What’s Life Like After Forged in Fire?

Steve Gorsvenor competed and won on Forged in Fire, the History Channel program. But what happens after the lights go out and the knifemakers go home?

The Argus Leader caught up with Gorsvenor to ask just that. From the article:

He’s never done learning. Never done perfecting his craft.

“A simple score in music, right? A simple score is just a few notes and it’s very straightforward. Nothing fancy,” Grosvenor said. “When you get into a forged blade, the score can be Beethoven. I mean, it’s just where do you want it to end?”

In other words, knifemakers don’t know how to stop. An appearance on a popular TV show isn’t the peak. It’s another stop on the journey into the craft of knifemaking.

Grosvenor likely isn’t alone. Contestants, as BLADE reported here, experience a boost in sales after appearing on the show. They don’t rest on their laurels for long.

A Steak Knife that Looks Like a Scalpel

On Feb. 19, new knife company Skalpel will launch a Kickstarter to prime the pump for its steak knife. The twist? It looks like a scalpel.

While some most Kickstarter knives should be taken with a grain of salt, the Skalpel is backed up by an actual knifemaker, Stuart Mitchell, out of Sheffield, England. Each knife is made from “high carbon, surgical grade steel,” per the website.

No word yet on whether there will be a matching fork.

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Instagram Photos Land Knife Retailer in International Hot Water

Instagram is a haven for the knife community (follow BLADE‘s account here), but some accounts are under fire for promoting products legal in one country but illegal in another. 

Take Alien Outfitter’s Instagram account. Based out of the United States, Alien Outfitters sells knives disguised as mundane objects, such as combs or lipstick. When Instagram users in the United Kingdom followed links to order the knives, they could successfully make a purchase. Such knives, however, are banned from import.

Rather than keeping this a customer service issue, some are attacking Instagram itself for hosting the images in the first place.

From The Telegraph:

The Ben Kinsella Trust, a campaigning charity set up in memory of Ben Kinsella, a 16-year-old stabbed to death in Islington a decade ago, said it was appalling that Instagram was helping promote the US company Alien Outfitters.

“Instagram’s action in hosting this site is reprehensible,” said Patrick Green, the charity’s chief executive. “They are glamorising these knives as fashion accessories. This is a forum where young people openly encourage each other to break the law by buying flick knives and concealed knives which are illegal for any age group.”

BLADE does not condone purchasing knives that are illegal in your area. However, it finds that attacking images of knives posted online that are otherwise illegal is as fruitless as it gets. There are thousands upon thousands of knife-related accounts on Instagram. The Internet at large contains millions of blogs, websites and social media accounts depicting knives.

To that end, Instagram is not in the wrong here. Whether the retailer or customer is more at fault isn’t a question I can answer. Oftentimes, stories like these are how the knife community learns about the hard stops in the patchwork of knife laws around the world.

UK Police Find It “Disappointing” Anyone Would Carry a Knife

Policies discouraging knife ownership in the United Kingdom are often cited in the global knife community, but it can be difficult back up their impact with numbers.

Enter the “Bin a Blade” campaign. It solicits unwanted knives from the public using drop boxes, similar to how people in the United States can dispose of prescription meds at police stations. In Suffolk, England, the campaign took in 20,000 knives.

From The Lowestoft Journal:

Likewise, Suffolk’s police and crime commissioner Tim Passmore pledged his support to the initiative.

He said: “To see that over 20,000 blades have been collected since the initiative was launched is excellent.

“We need to do all we can through education, peer pressure, policing and sentencing to make it absolutely clear that it’s never acceptable for a person to carry a knife or weapon.

“I find it really disappointing that anyone carries a blade of any kind.”

Reducing crime is a worthy cause, but one questions the efficacy of such amnesty drives. In 2006, when 90,000 knives were turned in as part of a UK-wide amnesty drive, crime rates changed little. 

Further amnesty drives did little to change the upward swing of violence in years since. In England and Wales, last year marked the highest number of crimes involving a knife or sharp instrument since 2011, according to the BBC. Most of these crimes involved robbery or assault.

Although knives remain the instrument of choice for criminals, 77 percent of violent attacks are committed with no weapons at all. 

As for knives, they account for seven percent of attacks.

Cape Town Water Crisis Impacts Knifemakers

but no rain! Are you kidding me! pic.twitter.com/dI4Smz4XXl

— Tim Flack (@tim_meh87) February 13, 2018

Four million people will be without water in a few months unless conditions change in Cape Town, South Africa. That includes knifemakers living in the area.

BLADE is hearing from the hot knife shops in Cape Town under stress due to water restrictions and related pressures. The impacts include the obvious, such as using leftover shower water to flush toilets, to the lesser known, such as the steep opportunity costs of waiting in line for water. The criminal element is also on the rise as people become more desperate.

BLADE will continue to monitor the feedback from knifemakers in the area, and present opportunities for those outside South Africa to help should they arise.

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