Story Behind the Space Style: Cosmic Knife Set

We've always loved the Cosmic Image knife set — it's one of our highest-rated products and always eye-catching to display at the BOOTHtique. Recently, we struck up a chat with Philip Weedle, founder of Chef's Vision, over email and were thrilled to learn the story behind the designs.

Philip specially chose these six images out of thousands available from the Hubble Space Telescope. After sharing over 40 iterations with family and friends, he narrowed the candidates down to the final design, matching images to the sizes and shapes of the blades and selecting complementary handle colors. The final images include massive star and nebula WR 124 and M1-67, the Veil Nebula, NGC 602 in the Small Magellanic Cloud, the star cluster Pismis 24 in NGC 6357, the Crab Nebula, and Star Forming Region S106.

"The Cosmos set was one of the more interesting ones to design because some images were much more polarizing compared to the other [knife] sets that have more consistent preferences," Philip said. "For example, the Crab Nebula image came up 1st or 2nd preference for a few people while others had it 5th or 6th choice. Even though I wasn't a huge fan of it initially, there were enough people who really loved it that I decided it should be kept in."

Philip then designed a companion booklet to help teach people about the real science in the images on these knives, using resources from NASA. "Even though the Cosmos set was the second knife set that was released, it was the first to contain a booklet," he said. This started a tradition of creating an informational booklet for each new knife set, including others about wildlife and masterpiece paintings.

The image of WR 124, a Wolf-Rayet star, surrounded by the M1-67 nebula, on the paring knife has another fun note to its story: this particular image was processed by a citizen scientist named Judy Schmidt, aka SpaceGeck on many social media platforms. Other images in the set were available from the NASA Hubble team.

And last but not least, the knife set found its way into our shop after COO Debbie received them as a gift from her son (and our model), Matthew!

You can get a set of your own cosmic knives, plus a matching magnetic stand and knife covers, from our shop!