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Originally Posted by Jeff Pringle
I think the pattern difference above is a lighting artifact, with different lighting the pattern should look uniform across the surface.
Patterns in wootz come from the fact that when the steel starts to solidify, the first crystals 'want' to be pure iron/carbon - the impurities in the melt become concentrated in the areas of secondary crystalization, in between the networks of already solid metal. So the impurites do get localized to a degree.
Theoretically, you can control the grain orientation, and hence ultimate pattern, by manipulating the shape of the solidifying metal (by casting into a mold of varying thickness), but I don't think anyone is working on this yet.
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Pattern's orientation is going to depend on the sample's size/shape if it is comparable to the grain's thickness, however imho since the interaction between particles here is a short range, the thickness of grains mostly going to depend on chemical composition of the sample.
What I was thinking is that if one locally introduces an impurity, preferrably such that an energy bonding to the pattern if favorable over bonding to the matrix, one can probably create really nice patterns, not very practical, but very nice indeed.