For the Metalsmith and Avid Angler, the Knife is a Scalpel, Not a Saw

From the look of her studio, it seems Joyce Kutty can’t decide which of her passions to pursue on any given day. The petite, unvarnished space in a former Fall River textile mill is as petite and unvarnished as Kutty herself, filled with the rugged ingredients the knife maker manipulates to craft her bespoke blades. Sheets of steel cover her worktable, carving tools and hammers with worn-shiny handles hang within arm’s reach on pegs, raw wood leans into a corner, a band saw and kiln wait in an adjacent space.

But a workstation for watercolor painting belies a softer side. In a sketchpad, she paints the fish she caught last week, as well as how to clean and break it down, near shelves that cradle handtied flies for fly fishing and beloved wooden bowls from her ancestral home in India.

Kutty is indeed a product of her environment and her 17 years as a metalsmith. She and her Carhartt overalls and scuffed Dr. Martens are as comfortable among the weathered hardwoods, sawdust and machinery of the Smokestack Studios space that she shares with 15 other craftspeople as they are along the Point Judith shoreline where she has fished with her father since childhood. Bringing home the freshest fish to prepare with her mother for supper in their North Providence home, she now fashions knives as an amalgamation of all that delights her.

“I guess my curiosity was in between hyper-specialized and more variable tools,” Kutty says, while holding a flexible steel fillet knife that she crafted to fit her lithe hands. “For me, knife making is something that I’m not reinventing. People have been doing it for centuries. So, there are theories that have been tested because they’ve stood the test of time.”

She discovered metalsmithing at Rhode Island College and later became a production jeweler for Tiffany & Co. But macular edema led to glaucoma and blindness in her right eye, which prevented her from seeing the finer details in small rings and necklaces. So, she channeled her creativity toward larger, stronger objects.

The first knife she made—a cheese knife made of brass—was horrible, she says. But it was a start. Trial, error and determination led her to establish a process that she relies on with every tailored blade. Beginning with a piece of cardstock cut in the shape of a cleaver, a utility or whatever other type of knife she’s making, she lays it against the eighth-inch-thick steel bar and traces out the shape on a band saw. She drills holes for the handle and rivets, then heats it to 1,750°F in a heat-treating kiln.

“I’ll take it out with tongs and gloves—it’s so hot it’s bright orange,” she says, while demonstrating at the kiln.

Then begins the quenching process, where she sandwiches the hot steel between two aluminum plates to gradually cool. This makes the blade brittle, she admits, so tempering at 400°F strengthens the steel for durability, cutting and precise slicing.

“It takes a whole day to cut this, to heat treat it and then another day to shape it. Once the handle is being put on, you can’t work on it until the epoxy is cured, and I have to leave it overnight. So, some of the process is hands-off work, where you’re waiting for the material to do its thing. Next day, I shape the handle and go from there,” she says, explaining that she books orders three months out. “That’s just the life cycle.”

Managing moisture and heat transfer in the handle prompted her to choose dense Bolivian rosewood or Wenge wood. These don’t separate from the tang, or the projecting part of the steel that’s in the handle, she explains, and hold their shape over time, which is critical to long-term usability. She holds the handle to a belt sander to roughly shape it and then uses sandpaper and different tools to refine. She also applies French’s yellow mustard to add patina.

This expertise she brings to her blades comes from knowing how to catch and break down a fish, another skill she learned as an angler and fishmonger, as well as to teaching jewelry and metalsmithing at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.

“The knife isn’t a saw; it’s a scalpel, so the tip is very important. And I use this edge of the knife—let’s say 50%—to break down the fish. I use the back that’s a little thicker, to break the bone, and then the length of the blade to get a nice cut, to separate the flesh from the bone,” she explains. “But this was really important to be flexible, not rigid, and the shape to be really pointed.”

As the state’s foremost knife maker, creating custom knives used in restaurant kitchens and residences around the region is at once a natural progression of her craft and a pivot from a former profession, which she welcomes with the ease of a craftswoman in perpetual exploration mode.

“I think, for me, creating a design that works with the space that is available to me—with labor, time, cost—is everything,” she says. “Settling on one process was the hardest part, because there are so many different ways to make a knife.”

Annie Sherman is a freelance journalist in Newport, writing about everything from food and business to interior design and the environment in the Ocean State.

For more information, visit KuttyKnives.com