After looking at everyone's work for the past couple of years I thought it was time to post some of my own.  I say my own, but this knife was made by myself and my girlfriend on our 5th anniversary.  We're about to move into our first place together and decided it would be a great project to do together.  So our anniversary saw us lighting the forge and hammering this out, myself holding the stock and leading and my girlfriend, sledgehammer in hand, striking, this is the result.

Statistics, before you ask:
400 layers of 15n20 and Uddeholm 20c, triple normalised then heated to non-magnetic and quenched in pre-heated canola oil, not the most technical heat treat but one that I'm familiar with and have had success with before.   It was then tempered at 200c for two one hour cycles.

The blade is 8" 1/4 overall length, 5" 5/8 cutting edge, just under 1/8" thick at the spine, tapering to 1/16" an inch from the blade tip.

The handle will most likely be curly birch and bog oak, though I have some beautiful oak burl and some stabilised spalted beech that are also options.

Also my girlfriend made herself a pendant with an offcut

Beautiful! Can't wait to see it finished.
If you go with the oak, can I suggest roughing up the inside faces of the slabs, then sealing with polly before gluing, as otherwise the tannic acids in the oak may well eat away the steel.

Thanks for the tip! I'll sure remember to do that!

A sledgehammer wielding girlfriend, dude your so lucky...all my girl wants to do is buy shoes

beautiful work BTW

And here I expected to see one of those short traditional Japanese swords used for ritual suicide to put you out of your misery....

 

Beautiful work there.