To begin, I am an artist first and foremost and not a businessman, how does this affect the way I go about things? Well, first of all I don’t craft and sell knives to make money, as I respectfully suppose some might. I build knives because I think they’re beautiful.

At the risk of coming across as philosophical, I will digress.

I love beautiful things above anything else and it’s what I want to flow out me above everything else. I’m also a writer and a musician/singer, and though I strive for beauty in those things, they are different. Their beauty is experienced in a very intellectual, and emotional way. A knife’s beauty is experienced in a completely different way. You use your eyes to measure and discern the geometry and curves that in their own mysterious way are either attractive or not to the human eye, this makes it very much like visual art. However worthy my striving for visual aesthetics is, (and I think it is) it would limit me to the work of a display knife. I don’t build display knives, and so comes the second beauty in the art. You see the knife and it’s pleasing to your eyes, but then you pick it up, you use the nerves in your hand to feel the smoothness of the grain or to detect the comfort of the ergonomics, this makes it very much like a tool, which it is. I cannot see with my eyes or handle with my fingers the tune of a singer, or the chords of an instrument, or the letters of the writer. This makes bladesmithing unlike anything else I’ve put my hands to.

Now how does selling my knives come into this? Well they say the artist is the starving one; never a truer statement. I’m not very good at making money, but thankfully I’ve been blessed with people who excel in that way and with their help I have been able to make connections and customers (like you) who have generously made it possible for me to continue my passion… and not starve. 🙂

I’ve always been inspired to create beauty through my hands, it’s ingrained in me, and more importantly… given to me. I believe that there is a God and that He loves me and has given me a gift. I’m daily inspired to create beauty in all that I do when I feel the pleasure of a job well done and when I see His beauty in what’s around me.

With those things in mind, I really don’t consider myself the “self-made” maker of DaBeachy Knives any more than I consider myself the maker of molecular process that take soft, mild steel and conforms it into hardened carbon steel. Good thing too, the world might’ve had to wait a long time to see that one happen.

-Dietrich A. Beachy