Eight years ago, I signed up for my very first blacksmithing class at the John C Campbell Folk School. At the time it felt like such a crazy idea--to put my life on pause for a week and go immerse myself in learning something new. (They say that the Folk School changes you, and that's been emphatically the case for me.)

Over the years those classes, those pauses. became more and more crucial to me. They became opportunities to reset, to unlearn bad habits, to master new skills, to explore new ideas, and to connect with other creatives and metal-heads. Each pause is an opportunity to become a better blacksmith, a better teacher. 

This October, I'll be returning to John C Campbell for four months as part of their student host program.  I am very excited to be returning to the shop where I first learned to play with hot steel. The Folk School is one of my favorite places on the planet; a home away from home. Some of the best blacksmiths teach there, and I'm excited to have the opportunity to learn all I can from them. (It's even possible that I may take some non-blacksmithing classes just to shake things up a bit!)

I'm acutely aware that it's a long time to step away from Ms Caitlin's School, so if you've been considering taking a class, I'll be teaching here until September 27th, so sign up now to reserve your spot!  

If you can't fit in a class with me this Fall, check out this amazing resource of other blacksmithing schools, come see me at the Folk School, and stay tuned for exciting new class availability in February 2018! 

And naturally, stay tuned for updates from Brasstown, NC! 

I was not the best math student.

It started early. I buckled down and memorized multiplication tables, but fractions were... difficult and confusing. I liked the puzzle of algebra at first, but keeping track of the decimal places and negative signs was like herding cats. I thought geometry was really cool, but I didn't have an intuitive sense for whether the answer made sense or not.  

By senior year of high school, I was being tutored by my teacher twice a week and my confidence in math was pretty dismal. I took calculus in college and the fact that I remember nothing about it leads me to suspect I've consciously blocked it out. (Stats were a bit different--more learning the concepts and knowing which buttons to press when--which was lucky because I had to take 3 stats classes.) 

And then I took up blacksmithing. 

I attended Blacksmith Days at the Blacksmith Guild of Central Maryland in 2010 where Mark Aspery was giving a demonstration on some complicated joinery that was the subject of his third book (buy the books). He was talking about the math necessary to get everything to fit correctly. 

I felt that old familiar tightness in the back of my throat.  Ah, my arch nemesis, we meet again! 

But Mark wasn't advocating for precision down to three decimal places; that's the realm of machinists.  Blacksmiths need to get close enough. Close enough so that it fits. Close enough to look right. Close enough so that you don't have to do a lot of extra work. 

"Okay", I thought. "I can do that.  Maybe."

In 2014, I took a class with Matt Jenkins at the John C Campbell Folk School and tried my hand at mortise and tenon joinery for the first time, making a garden trellis.  Making a tenon on one end of the bar is just a matter of using the tools correctly.  Getting the bar between two tenons to be a specific size doesn't happen by chance. I broke out Excel and programmed it to calculate the stock size I'd need to start with for each piece. A few weeks later, I gave a demonstration about the project at Central Virginia Blacksmith Guild and shared my experience. 

​That was the beginning. 

[You don't NEED math to do amazing things in metal.  It's just that math helps newbies skip over about 10-20 years of trial-and-error experience.]