I refined some skills and learned some new skills in 2023. I didn’t do a very good job of documenting them. I started blacksmithing casually in early 2022 or thereabouts. I’m still very casual about it and had probably a five or six month dry spell in 2023 when I was busy with other things or my home forge was busted or I was injured. But I did make some things.

Here’s a progress shot of the early steps of an anvil stand in progress for a new anvil I bought late in the year. In this picture, it’s just legs welded to a flat surface. I’m nearly finished now but don’t have good pictures. It’s my first piece of proper metal fabrication work, and when I’m finished, it should securely hold a 120-pound anvil. Not pictured: My very ugly welds. I’m pleased that it stands up and is level. A year or two ago, it would never have occurred to me that I could make something like this, simple though it is. I had to do trigonometry to get the angles right. I am not a math person.

The main blacksmithing project I worked on in the last quarter or so of the year was a set of small roasting forks. My family does a white elephant gift exchange for Christmas, striving to contribute gifts that people will really want. The stealing game is strong in this family. Last year I offered an ornamental snail made out of rebar and a decorative railroad spike knife. This year, my wife commissioned a set of roasting forks to go with s’mores fixins and a small table top Solo-style stove.

I had a lot of trouble getting the forks to a point at which I could bear to give them to someone. I made probably 20+ to get five keepers. I tried different techniques, metal sizes, and tools to make the forks and finally got to where I could make them fairly consistently. I broke the tines off of several nearly finished forks right at the end of the process, which was sort of heartbreaking. Eventually I decided “these will have to be good enough.” Here are the finished forks, held in such a way that many of the awful flaws are harder to see. 🙂

I’ve accumulated more hammers and tongs and got tired of having them spread out all over my garage floor, so I used some random spare wood I had lying around and made a simple tool rack. it’s a little wobbly, but it does help keep my “shop” a little tidier. This picture is from directly above.

I made several knives, but nothing really worth showing. In my hands, a knife is sort of a knife. I enjoy making simple hooks and made a coat/hat rack to hang on my garage wall. It has turned out to be very handy. The wood work isn’t the finest, but I was pretty satisfied with making the hooks in such a way that they’d actually be useful rather than just metal things lying around.

It’s kind of weird to make a knife for somebody and just hand it to them naked, so I also took up a little leather craft so that could make sheaths. It’s not as hard as it might seem initially, really, if you have a few tools. The one pictured here isn’t quite finished, and the photo doesn’t show the belt loop on the other side, but you get the idea. What looks like fancy weaving is really just the impressions made by a stamp.

Through my maker space, I had a chance to learn basic stained glass techniques, so I put a few pieces together. These four pieces are around eight or nine inches on a side (some much closer to square than others) and were my take on a “seasons” theme. I gave them to a friend who had expressed an interest in some stained glass. Winter is my favorite.

And the last one below is a piece I made for my daughter, who toured a bunch of state parks this summer with her grandmother, including Bryce Canyon, which was her favorite. The dominant feature is a stone formation known as “Thor’s Hammer.” I can see lots of defects, but overall I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. It’s about a foot on a side, and I used zinc came to add a frame and some rigidity.

I’ve never really felt like a handicraft sort of person, but in 2023 in particular, I was exposed to a lot of new skills. My maker space community is great. I really enjoy doing stained glass, and even after a longish break from blacksmithing, I felt as if I came back with better hammer control an a better sense of how to move metal where I want it to go. This week, I’m taking a wood turning class in my maker space, so maybe in the coming year, I’ll make some bowls or something. It’s fun to make tangible things that are functional or pretty.