Going hammer and tongs inside George Rousis’ blacksmithing studio

Outside a weathered house on Woodland Avenue, the clang of metal striking metal reverberates up and down your spine as you approach the front door. You wonder if the man inside will hear you knock. You look at the intricately sculpted iron handle, and the sounds make sense.

Beyond the door is the studio of George Rousis, metalsmith. The space is messy, a little ramshackle, but it is also a place where fine things are made. Some of his bronze, iron and copper statues are the size of a wedding ring. Others are as large as the entryway gates he fashioned for the Children’s Garden at the Kansas City Community Garden.

In the bowels of his studio, Rousis could pass for a Vulcan working his forge: sturdy from years of swinging hammers, his beard full enough to be a fire hazard. He says wearing a kilt has cured his back pain, but he also needs to be able to move easily. He’s forever dropping things, dashing from one spot in the studio to the next, his trade a business timed in swiftly passing seconds.

He heats up the forge and throws in the front half of the stake to get it hot, pulling it out when it glows red from the 2,200-degree heat. He transfers it — handling the cool end without gloves — to the anvil in front of the forge. “I like to be able to feel what I’m doing,” he says.

Rousis picks up a mallet and begins to flatten the end of the stake, da-da-da-dada, the last two taps directly on the anvil. It’s maybe a minute on the anvil before the black cold eclipses the red hot of the metal, rendering it again unworkable. Back into the heat it goes.

When Rousis designs for a client — his work is largely commissioned; Organic Iron Concepts is his business — he sketches the idea using software. (“It’s very hard when you make something for someone and you never hear if they liked it or if it arrived,” he says. “If someone doesn’t like something I made for them, then I’m not done.”) For his own pieces, though, he’s more abstract. “Sometimes the metal speaks and tells me what it wants to do,” he says.

At the anvil again, Rousis begins to flatten the metal. Using tongs, he then picks up the rod and plunges it into a metal tub of water. There’s a hiss, and the tongs fall to the floor. Rousis ignores the clatter and reaches into the tub with his hands. His bushy eyebrows shoot up with a polite “ow.” Hot metal still seems to take him by surprise, but a telling tin of Burt’s Bees hand salve waits nearby.

He switches to smaller mallets, hammering the top of the stake into what looks like a spear. Then come the finer tools, and a curved outline of a leaf appears. Eventually, he’ll take a tool with a wedged end and chisel veiny indentations into the metal.

He wants a fold down the middle. He could chisel that, too, but instead he urges the metal leaf in on itself until the outside edges almost touch. Rousis puts the metal back into the forge so he can pry the sides open again. He works with the other end of the rod, keeping the leaf out of the heat now, pounding the metal into a scythe shape before curving it around the rod’s end using a blowtorch and his bare hands. It becomes a rose blossom, the base of which isn’t as sturdy as he had in mind.

“There’s always a point where you need to stop, where it won’t look quite the same,” he says. “It’ll break if you push the metal.”

When that happens, there’s nothing to do but start over. That doesn’t happen often anymore, but when it does, Rousis copes — playing disc golf or crushing the occasional Hamm’s empty in one of his weighted presses.

Now he heats the center of the rod and bends it into a U. The curve at the bottom gets pounded onto a flat surface until it starts to get a thicker base, the way a woman’s shoe heel does after months of walking. It’s called “upsetting” the metal. “It’s pissed off,” Rousis says.

The second-to-last step is to get the scorched metal — the scabs — off the form, using a tool that resembles a metal pot scrubber coupled with a polishing brush. Rousis dashes away the bits, sending flakes into the air that look like pencil shavings, minuscule daggers that sting on contact. Taking off that rough exterior lets the iron glint between the matte particles.

Rousis polishes the finished rose with a hunk of beeswax, which cools and polishes the iron, “sinking into its pores,” he says. The vine wraps around the stem like some prop from a steampunk Disney film. It’s for his wife. It’s their anniversary tonight.