Not too long ago, all products were made by hand. Great skill
was required to produce a product of acceptable quality and people
would start out at an early age as an apprentice to learn a trade.
The art of producing silver products including flatware, bowls, pitchers,
trays, tumblers and other fine utensils took many years of practice
to perfect. An apprentice might learn his trade from his father and
pass down the skills from generation to generation. This is the case
for the master craftsman Richard Blanchard Sr. silversmith.


	In our modern machine age the craftsman has all but disappeared.
Machinery can be configured to stamp out a product in less than a second
that used to take even a master craftsman hours or even days to produce. 


	The purpose of this website is to document the life of this master
silversmith and preserve as much of the knowledge available about how he
went about his work. The patterns that he created and the tools he used
to create his hand made masterpieces will be displayed on this website
as well as a history of his life.

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