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Hello, Thanks for taking the time to look into my webpage. My name is Michael Miller. In the following lines, I will attempt to give you a brief look at who I am. GEMS I've been interested in rocks and gems since I was about seven years old. In the early seventies, I learned the art of gem faceting and began my career as a cutter. I expanded my knowledge of gems through courses offered by the Gemological Institute of America, and settled into a local jewelry store to practice jewelry appraising and lapidary arts. For the next ten years, I provided appraisals, gem identification and custom gem cutting services to my local community. TROUBLED TEENAGERS All of my life, I've had a desire to help people. I was trained in special education techniques in the late 60's but didn't really do anything with the training until the 80's. In 1985, I was presented with an opportunity to work with young people who hadn't been doing so well in life or in school - kids in trouble. I accepted the challange and dedicated the next 17 years to working with troubled teens. KNIFE MAKING Somewhere around 1998, I was looking through a box of magazines that had been donated to my school and found a couple of copies of BLADE Magazine. I was extreemely impressed by the craftsmanship displayed by contemporary knife makers. I was fascinated by modern Damascus steel, in particular. Here was a field where a number of my talents and interests could come together to produce a single product. I had a little "spare" time on the weekends, so I built a forge, acquired some coal and talked some of my boys into hammerin' steel with me. I was determined to master the art of forge welding and make damascus. Well, two years and a new, gas-fired forge later, my skills had advanced to where I could stack and forge weld several peices of steel into a single billet, then fold it and weld it as many times as necessary to achieve the number of layers I wanted for a knife blade. I learned a lot about steel, about forging, and about knives in those two years - and I learned that the more you learn about this craft, the more there is to learn. The school closed its doors in June of '02. Since then, I have been making knives full time. I enjoy the freedom of spontaneous creation - most of my knives are made that way. Though I may have a rough idea of a size or shape when I begin a knife, the final blade is always created "in the moment". |