Sheaths for Knives: July 2010

Last months have been hectic as never before. Custom orders kept pouring in, and for the first time I went over my 8-10 week backlog. Some of you guys are waiting longer then agreed upon and to most of you I allready explained the situation, but I think it's good to do it here also so everybody knows what to expect.

This is what caused delays..
-I received a couple of large orders from our guys who are deployed abroad which ate away a couple of weeks. No need in saying these are prioritized.
-Going from 6 hours of sheathwork a week to 20 hours caused some troubles with my hands. I collected some small cuts and bruises, and working around them without sufficiënt recuperating caused muscle and tendon aches, therefore I had to take it very easy for a couple of weeks.
-Receiving lots of orders at the same time for the same knife. Especially the Bravo-1, RC-3, F-1 and the new Swamprat releases will take longer then expected at first. I only have 1 patternknife of each, and one knife occupies a sheath for 5 days..
-I have always been trying to help the people that send there knife over first, so they don't have to miss their knife very long. Since more and more people are sending their knives to me this is causing delays.
-I do sheathwork for 1 professional knifemaker, Andrew Jordan (http://www.jordanknives.com/) and I agreed on a 3 week deadline with him expecting an avarage of 1 knife every month or so, but this has turned into sometimes 6 or 7 knives a month. In order to serve him as good as possible others suffered. This is not good, and I will reorganize.

Anyway,
I learned to expect the unexpected, and need to work with larger and more flexible windows from now on. I'm very happy most of you guys understand, but if there's someone who I haven't had contact with, that is approaching his 'deadline', please contact me for an update.

a good thing is my hands are getting trained more and more and are slowly turning into vice-like grips with some kind of hardened buffalo skin on them, and I can efficiëntly maintain the 20 hour a week hand labour..

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Next anouncement is that the editor of this blog has changed for the better, and I have been able to update excisting posts with newer work. Now you'll find more examples and recent work of a given model under the corresponding link on the left.

New is the "pages" feature on the left.. click it!

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Now some sheaths.

I made so many, I can't post them all, but a lot of the newer ones are also to be found under the links in the lefthand column.

enjoy the pics..

Toni Oostendorp (http://www.eastvillageknives.com/) Bull Shark Mk. II