Christmas in July

“Leather & Canvas Knife or Tool Roll - This is an excellent and useful product. The waxed canvas is very durable and it looks really good with the brown suede leather pockets. It hold your knives securely, but you have to be careful how you position your knives so that no exposed bolsters or handles come into contact with one another when you roll it up. The single strip of rawhide does an excellent job of keeping it from unrolling. All that is required is that you wrap the rawhide around itself a couple of turns and it is secure. Because I do not show my knives at shows, I didn’t even know how useful I would find this item until I read A.G. Russell’s obituary. I found his obituary liberating because I learned that he never went forth without six knives on his person. I guess I have limited imagination because it had never occurred to me to carry more than one knife at a time. Because one of the purposes of my knives is to partially fulfill the need for art in my life, I had been a believer in “the knife du jour.” I have many different knives that I like to carry so that they each get the opportunity to be admired and the virtues of their designs, choice of materials and Craftsmanship pondered over a cup of coffee with buddies at Starbucks (back in the pre-Covid era). While opportunities are now more limited for discussions with friends about one’s knives, they still do at least occasionally occur. So, the day after I read Mr. Russell’s obituary, I headed up to my club for some pheasant hunting with seven knives on my person. While waiting on the deck of my clubhouse during pheasant stocking, I had the pleasure of discussing the virtues of these knives with one of the members whom I did not know collected knives. In fact, we ran out of knives to discuss. When I arrived at home later that day, the latest Russell catalog was waiting for me in the mailbox, and in it was this new product. The next time I headed up to my club, I had a dozen knives in this roll and had the pleasure of discussing all of them. What a useful product! Changes: It would be nice if it had a suede piece at the top that could be folded down before rolling the roll up, so as to protect expose bolsters or handles. But, I will simply get a chamois car wipe and cut it to size for this purpose. Rating: 10/10  ”