Kay Foye has working hands. Rough, often dirty, the signs of her trade are cut and burned forever into her skin. It’s easy to assume they have always looked that way, that they have been shaped by her forge, just as she shapes the knives that emerge from it. In some ways, that assumption is true. Her experiences are layered in her hands. Keyboards, pens, ropes and reins, hot dinner plates, the soft cushion of a yoga mat. Three-and-a-half decades of living and searching for what feels right.
A patchwork of yesterdays have led to this point in her story. The knives that leave her workshop illustrate that. Mason jars of bone, metal, wood, stone, crystal, antler, and countless items with significance to her and many others fill her collection, each with the potential to unlock memories that become buried as time passes. Many of her clients send her objects that are dear to them, priceless trinkets to be transformed into a blade handle. Kay cherishes the opportunity to create something beautiful that represents lives well lived, loved ones, and special moments in time. Today, Kay Foye is a knifemaker, a title earned over years of gut decisions that have created harmony in her being.
“A knife became at home on her belt, its weight a reassurance, its absence a distress.”
As a young girl, Kay would disappear for hours in the forests and streams of her youth, and every day she would return with something to keep. Her mother provided small wooden boxes to house her daughter’s treasure trove of rocks and sticks, though their significance was a mystery to her. Curiosity defined her adolescence, and after a series of moves around the East Coast, her family eventually settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where her first exposure to horses at
