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by David Thomas August 21, 2022
The next time you’re heading west on the I-90 out of town from Gillette, WY, take the north exit on South Burma and you’ll find yourself just a few minutes away from the Rock-Paper-Scissors Sculpture.
Time it right and you can celebrate World Rock, Paper, Scissors Day on August 27th.
The roadside attraction stands outside the Gillette News Record and features the three different items stacked on top of another with the scissors on top.
We’ve never been but the town looks sweet, even though the city guide says you stand a 1 in 49 chance of becoming a victim of either a violent or a property crime. The sculpture itself is cool and we traced one of the artists, Kevin Box, down to the Santa Fe area where he makes different versions of it, as well as some interesting origami garden structures.
More of a museum and craft scissors kind of traveller? The Ciselier team has done some artisan workshop visits in Europe but the staff are not accustomed to scissor geeks walking in off the street. One company that is particularly evangelical about the craft of making heritage scissors is Ernest Wright in Sheffield, England.
We profiled Ernest Wright recently and you can read more about their plans to renovate their current space and add space where tourists can watch the magic of grinding, polishing and ‘puttertogethering’
The company won a 2020 Heritage Craft Award for its efforts to keep an endangered craft alive and well. While it maintains strong ties to traditional quality scissor manufacturing, Ernest Wright intends to remain very much alive and not become a museum. Luckily, there are actual museums dedicated to Sheffield’s history as a center of cutlery and scissors manufacturing.
Start your museum visits with the Kelham Island Museum in the center of town, where you can get hundreds of years of industrial history, including information on master cutlers and scissor makers. Museums Sheffield has more information on galleries and collections.
The name Solingen is synonymous with quality steel manufacturing, from cutlery to knives, swords and, of course, scissors. The old German town north of Düsseldorf is still the country’s centre of steel manufacturing, a title it has been able to claim for a thousand years.
Klingenmuseum as a place to start, with a focus on knives as well as cutlery. And scissor geeks should not miss the Gesenkschiede Hendricks, which has a great collection of old scissors in a working forge for tours. The Industry Museum complex can point you to more places to visit and look into the Balkhauser Kotten (a blade grinding cottage) and Wipperkotten, another working museum in a small blade making cottage.
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