“I’m Grace Horne and I’m a scissor maker. I moved to Sheffield in 1993 hoping to become a knife maker with Stan Shaw. He decided back then, aged 70, that he was too old to take on an apprentice so he sent me away with a whole load of blades and springs and told me to figure it out myself because it wasn’t that complicated.”

“He was right in a lot of ways but there’s no doubt that having somebody to show you would be great.” The city still has a lot of allied trades and there’s an underlying, embedded interest in knives. “So many people have a grandmother who used to be a buffer or they have kept their father’s silver pocket knife because they once worked in the trade. There’s still that connection there and so I stayed in Sheffield.”

Horne did an MA in metal work and jewellery and ended up studying for a PhD in laminated steels at Sheffield Hallam University. She worked in a shop to earn money while studying and slowly built up her practice, making pieces that she really wanted to make. For part of her research, she spent time travelling around Sheffield visiting all the people she wanted to work with. She calls it “a roving apprenticeship”.

At work in her studio which is an old public toilet, in Fulwood, a residential suburb of Sheffield. “It took me so long to persuade the previous owner - who owned 20 public toilets across the city - to sell it to me that I’d already made a Lego model of the building so I knew where everything was going to go.”

“It was originally built in the early 20th century for the city’s tram drivers at the Fulwood terminus. It had two bays, so where my workbench is would have been the in door and where my entrance is now would have been the out door. It’s typical Victorian overkill. It’s lovely and I couldn’t ask for a nicer property really. It’s small but that keeps me really focused on not doing big stuff or accumulating more machinery than I need. I’m so tight for space I’ve built mini drawers into a recess in the outer brickwork.”

“I’m always fascinated when people say they’ve got one of my knives on a secondhand market. I always ask which one, send me a picture and tell me how it’s been and being used so I can keep track and wish it well on its journey. I’m only the start, I don’t have any sorrow about it moving on and doing its thing.”

Horne started out making knives but became passionate about scissors. “One of the knives I was making had a couple of blades and a little pair of scissors and I realised that although my scissors worked fine, if they didn’t I wouldn’t know why or what to do to put them right. I decided to contact Ernest Wright & Son who are the last people making scissors. At the time, there were three old guys all working past retirement age so I set aside the summer and asked if I could come and work alongside them and learn to make scissors. It was wonderful.”

Horne has not yet returned to making knives. “Everything about scissor making satisfies me and ticks the boxes about everything I originally loved about making pocket knives. They’re fiddly, they’re temperamental, every part relies on each other and you can’t make a formula and say ‘Ok, this is how it’s going to work’.”

“I cut a lot of stuff with just a jewellery saw and use my little riveting hammers, files and really basic tools. If somebody came here from 100 years ago, they wouldn’t be surprised at all the tools I’m using, especially not my traditional Sheffield knife maker’s stiddy (anvil) which came from the late Trevor Ablett (one of Sheffield’s best known knife makers). It’s the best tool for the job and there are times when I make silly mistakes and I can almost hear him tutting and rolling his eyes.”

She uses a selection of hammers, including one she made herself. “I’m definitely not a hammer maker and it’s straight off the forge so it’s a bit rough and ready. I often think if I did a bit of filing on it, it would look really smart but I never get round to it and it’s been there two years now.”

In addition to scissors, Horne makes corsets and bras in her spare time and says that although it seems like an unusual combination, it has a mutual link through engineering, knowledge of materials and precise craft skills

“These days we assume that we’re going to use one pair of scissors for everything. Even people that aren’t knife people will have more than one knife in the kitchen so there’ll be a butter knife, a kitchen knife and most probably a bread knife, so you never presume one will do everything. Strangely though people don’t think they’ll need more than one pair of scissors for a job. However, scissors can be geared with their end use in mind and I kind of quite like that.”

Horne mixes traditional and unique ways to make her scissors. “I make my own Damascus steel with friends in America every June and I have to make enough to keep me going for the next year so I will already have determined what projects I’m going to be doing for the following 12 months.”

“The issue with making scissors from Damascus steel is that if you’ve cut two pieces out of a block of steel, you try to get the pattern to match but then ,when you turn them over, the pattern doesn’t quite match and also it’s incredibly wasteful as there’s lots of offcuts. Then last year I had this eureka moment. There’s a process called EDM wire cutting where they pass a wire up to steel and a spark jumps between the wire and the steel and erodes it. It’s a really slow but incredibly precise way of cutting things out. So now I think I’m the only person making scissors using WEDM.”

“Once I start on a piece I’m completely embedded within that piece. I couldn’t keep two or three projects going simultaneously. I need total focus on what I’m doing at any one time. If I was a manufacturer and knew my process and how things were going to happen then I think that would be very different and I could be imagining while still making but, as it is, I can’t afford to let my attention slip because I’ll lose track of where I am and I’ll make mistakes and I can’t afford that because I can’t afford to remake anything.”

Each piece takes can take Horne hundreds of hours, maybe even thousands of hours, but she says that’s irrelevant. “If I knew I could definitely make it, there’d be no point in making it. I have to be teetering on the edge of failure all the time, otherwise there is no point to it and there are better things I could do with my life.”

Finishing a piece of work is hard for Horne, the time and the commitment she has shown to each piece take their toll. “I have a universal sense of desolation when I finish a piece and that’s the most dangerous time for my pieces of work to exist because that is the point at which I’m most likely to throw them out and reject them. That’s because I have an image in my head of the piece of work and while I’m making it, it exists in my head in its perfect form. While making it all I’m trying to do is make it as close to that perfection as possible.”

“There comes a point when I have finished it and put in that screw for the last time that I have to admit it will never be the perfection that it is in my head, that it will always be a slight pale, failed reality. I’ve learned that that feeling doesn’t last that long so what I need to do is to send it off to the photographer. There has to be the absolute bare minimum of time between me finishing it and having to get rid of it. An alternative strategy is that I’ve taken to hiding them as well so I’ll wrap them in cling film to somehow hide them from myself and stop me from examining them.”

After a few days she returns to the finished pieces, “by then their reality has overridden the perfection that was in my head and they now exist in their own right. I’m then more tolerant of any errors that I’ve made or the little foibles they have and I can be much more forgiving towards them. But, I find the precise point that I’ve finished them distressing beyond belief. However if I see pieces that I did a few years ago I wonder why I was ever worrying about them. Part of it is forgiveness and the pieces are allowed to have their little character flaws, that’s what makes them individual.” gracehorne.co.uk