The fifth annual Texas Select Custom Cutlery event was as big as ever and filled the Austin County Fair Convention and Expo Center last weekend with more than 120 knifemakers from around 20 different states.

Cowboy Szymanski, owner of Phenix Knives, said he was excited for the event to outgrow his blacksmith shop in Bellville but was happier to retain the help of the Austin County community.

“I’m always floored every year at how the community steps up and everybody that comes to the show is always amazed when you’ve got the mayor, the chief of police, the district attorney, you’ve got the county judge; all these guys that come to the event and will serve people,” Szymanski said Monday.

That foundation was one of the keys to success in putting the event on a larger stage.

“Every year for five years this has doubled, to this point almost tripled this year, and we still keep having the same success over and over and over,” Szymanski said Monday. “The Bellville and Sealy communities were very generous to open homes for these guys to stay in so they didn’t have to pay for that. They provided them with breakfast and dinners and were sitting around visiting with them. The Baptist and Methodist men’s clubs provided everybody breakfast in the mornings; it was just the whole community coming together to make this an absolutely amazing event for everybody.”

One of the nation’s largest gatherings of former Forged in Fire competitors allowed attendees to get up close and personal with the knifemaking

process, bid on auction items, make their own souvenir knife, visit vendors, throw a tomahawk and watch bladesmiths wield their creations in a bracket-style chopping competition.

This year, an addition was made for the bladesmiths, Szymanski said.

“Friday night, before we brought the crowds in, we did something new this year. We did a knife judging for the blade makers that were coming in,” he said. “You’ve got pocketknives that are worth over $5,000, incredible workmanship. Usually when you go to these shows, there are six, seven knives on the table. No, we had twenty knives in each category. Knifemakers are showing up with all this work and it made judging hard. But, to watch everybody with the anticipation, that was a very exciting moment for me.”

As he reflected at the beginning of this week, Szymanski and his wife Ilena were still trying to catch up on all of the social media posts from last weekend.

“The excitement, the joy, the awe over what we did was (amazing),” Szymanski said. “We’re still going through it today, trying to look through all the comments and all the people tagging us saying, ‘Crazy event. This is amazing. I bought six knives, I did this and that I had so much fun, I can’t wait to do it again next year.’ … And the compliments that Bellville, that Sealy, that all the communities in this area have received for what we’re doing here and that Austin County is by far one of the best, most fun places to go to.”