Every one has a style can I see yours 

you are ware that the Smithy is the building right?

My smithy's style is cluttered.

Frosty The Lucky.

Hahaha my bad! 

Our Smithy is organized confusion. My leaf style is what ever strikes my fancy at any given time. Here are but a few, the large maple leaves have been given away no pictures of them.

Looks great man, love how many styles there are when doing leafs 

I removed the quote, please read this...  The quote feature

Edited September 3, 20205 yr by Mod30
Remove excessive quote.

I tend to think of mine as laurel leaves.

Good Morning,

Laurel and Harley?? LOL

Neil

Is that a jiggler key on your keyring?

 

Pnut

Haha no just a cheep padlock key 

What size stock does everyone use for a standard leaf

Depends entirely on the project. I've used everything from 3/8" round to 1/2" x 2" flat bar, and I know folks who've used both larger and smaller stock.

Remember that leaves are traditionally not stand-alone items, but parts of larger projects. You want to scale your stock to the eventual size needed; there really is no "standard".

I'm with JHCC. I like to add decorative leaves at the ends of things like bottle openers or fire poker handles with little leaves. Sometimes a do big leaves. Depends on what I'm making. 

 

 

A couple of the many ginkgo leaves for a significant project that I really need to get back on...

 

Hmm I wonder if  real Wrought Iron would make good ginkgo leaves and the imperfections from hammering thin work as a feature rather than a flaw.  I have a long weekend and a lot of WI of various quality levels, I may have to give it a try.

As for starting stock size 1/8" to 1" sq stock; but I may go larger when I have a powered shop!

Now if you specify starting stock for a leaf keyring that would narrow things down a bit.

Thomas, a good experiment. I've never found a difference in wrought and mild steel in the finished product. The finished product is a function of hammer control.

A Renaissance leaf:

 

Real ginkgo leaves are notable for the striations on them.  Real wrought iron shows striations when etched.  Just trying to make use of a property of the material rather than putting striations in with hammer peen or chisel.

I have never seen a Ginkgo leaf with more than one centered notch in the outer edge.

I have; some cultivars seem more prone to it than others.  They have been around long enough to vary a bit.  In art the "perfect" leaf may be extolled or the imperfect leaves...

My neighbors have a huge old Ginkgo tree. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the leaves for my project and there seems to be two variations on this one tree. The lower branches have leaves similar to what I forged (shown above). Small random splits long the outer edge. The upper branches have more of the leave type with a deep split in the outer edge with a ~1/16” radius at the bottom of the split. 
 

Also the leaves all sprout from a the end of the woody twigs in groups including the fruit. (I hope this description is understandable?)
 

If there is interest, I’ll try to get pictures...

David

Wiki has nice photos of some of the various leaf shapes leaves:

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginkgo_biloba#/media/File:Ginkgo_Biloba_Leaves_-_Black_Background.jpg 

follow the arrows to see a bunch of different types including fossilized versions.

 

Interesting. My first intro to a ginkgo leaf.

Another idea would be to make them from a simple pattern welded steel etched in acid. 

Looking forward to your experiment.

My first intro to Ginkgo in general, was walking in a town near by, where Ginkgo trees lined the street sidewalks. When the fruit of the tree was stepped on it emitted a strong odor of dog poop.

Thought these would make a good project

By Rlarkin

 

This might give help with forging out leaves .

  http://treeproject.abavic.org.au/pdf-articles/How-to-Forge-a-Gum-Leaf.pdf

Dale Russell