My studio mate and dear friend, Kest Schwartzman, of Vagabond Metalworks, made a pretty big announcement about buying a permanent location for Vagabond Metalworks in Western Massachusetts. Although nothing has been finalized yet, I am excited for them! (And sad, too. Kest and I have been sharing space since 2015!) Ms Caitlin's School will be staying in the existing space. 
If the deal goes through (it looks pretty good--but one never knows), there will be some disruption of class time as we navigate moving Kest's metal shop out--likely in late August or early September. 
Moving a metal shop is... well, to be honest, it's something I can't even comprehend. There's SO MANY HEAVY TOOLS! And moving out of state DURING a pandemic is just... complicated. And EXPENSIVE. And time-consuming. 
If you have a little extra to spare to help Vagabond Metalworks transition, I'd appreciate it!

What does this mean for Ms Caitlin's School? EXCELLENT QUESTION!
In the short term (end of August, early September), there will be some class session cancellations to execute the move. If this impacts you, I will contact you as soon as possible. 
In the medium short term (mid-Septemberish), classes will resume as normal. 
After that, well, I'm kicking around a lot of very exciting ideas. But the transaction has not been finalized yet and I don't want to get too far ahead of myself. :)

In the meantime, stay tuned, donate to Kest's GoFundMe, and stay cool!

I used to struggle with making leaves. The leaf part would break off long before I finished working on the stem. I thought I was making the stem too thin. Turns out, I had some thin places which I could protect by making MORE of the stem thin. 

If that sounds weird and backwards, check out why in this video!

One of my students nudged me about my blog yesterday.  Oh, right. I really should post something, even just to say, "yep, still here!"

Yep. Still here!

It's been a whirlwind of a year since I last posted.  I feel like I've traveled more than I've been home.  I spent 4 incredible months at John C Campbell.  I was filmed for a few episodes of Man at Arms. I got to teach at John C Campbell, Touchstone, Brookfield, Central Maryland Blacksmith Guild, and I'm prepping up now for a class at the Banton-Smith Center. I got to help found the Society of Inclusive Blacksmiths.  I demoed for Central Virgina Blacksmith Guild, and will be demoing at NC-ABANA this weekend. In the spare moments in between, I've been teaching at my shop in Frederick, MD, doing some commissions, and sketching out curriculum for some new offerings! 

Each one of those experiences deserves to be its own blog post and, indeed, I have half-finished drafts that may, one day, get posted.  I've learned a lot, but need some time to process all that into coherent blog posts. 

I am looking forward to spending some dedicated time shop in October, November, and December.  I've just posted the class schedule for those three months.  We're planning an open studio soon, so stay tuned! 

I just got back from the Cascadia Center for Arts and Crafts where I joined 10 other blacksmiths for 5 days of blacksmithing and conversation about how to make blacksmithing more inclusive.  We are passionate about making space in this craft for all who want to participate, and especially passionate about making space for folks who have found it difficult to pursue the craft because of bias or discrimination. 

You can check out our website for our philosophy, mission, and road map as well as upcoming events. I'm really excited to be part of this group! 

We also made a really sweet bench! 
​

(Oops. This didn't get posted last year!)

I was back down at the John C Campbell Folk School last week for Blacksmith Work Week (check out this amazing walk-through video taken during work week!). During this week, we work on shop maintenance, tool repair, and we make things for the school. I arrive, hungry to fire up the forge and put my hammer to work. The resident artist of blacksmithing, Paul Garrett, hands me a giant can of hooks, and explains that over the years, he's collected nearly four cans of abandoned hooks from the window sills and the scrap bin. The hooks all need a little bit of work to be usable; some just need holes drilled. Some are half-finished.  Others need some re-shaping. 

I set to work. Hooks tend to be some of the first projects that folks do when they first learn to smith--and they are great first projects because there's an incredible opportunity for variety.  (If you have any question about the staggering variety of hooks you can make, check out the 366 Hooks project done by Matt Jenkins of Cloverdale Forge in Winnipeg, Canada.) I've been making hooks since I started blacksmithing so I was pretty confident that I could knock this task out easily. 

And WOW, did I learn a LOT. 

I make a point to NOT work on my student's work. In my post "Mistakes were Made" I wrote: "Mistakes and their fixes are THE MOST IMPORTANT PART of learning. I work extra special hard to create a safe space for students to learn and explore.  I'm here to help, to answer questions, to provide options, encouragement, and moral support, but students get to make --and fix-- their own mistakes.  And that means that they are empowered to do their own troubleshooting, which makes them a better smith down the road."

What kinda blew my mind about these hooks is that they were REALLY GOOD, but usually somewhere along the line, the student did something that made continuing to work on the hook especially challenging. In one case, they cut the metal short enough that it was challenging to hold the hook. In another case, the student made the hook out of square stock, but in bending the cup of the hook, the metal naturally bent on the diamond, so the hook appeared crooked. And it occurred to me that this is a prime example of beginners working harder than more experienced smiths. No experienced smith would set themselves up for these challenges. 

And yet--this exploration into how the metal moves, what is easy to fix and what is more challenging--is absolutely critical to developing the experience necessary to be a lazy blacksmith. To be an efficient blacksmith. To understand the metal. To really understand how deep this craft is. 

As a teacher, I guide students around a lot of these challenges, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes consciously. (In fairness, we have a finite amount of time together and I do try to help folks be successful at their projects in the time we have!) It's a good reminder of how important it is to let folks explore. 

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.]

In 2012, the flowchart How to Tell if a Toy is for Boys or Girls: a Guide made the rounds. I think about it every time I have a conversation about being a FEMALE blacksmith.  

Let me just confess right here that I don't use ANY of my lady parts for forging.  (I also don't call them lady parts.) 

We have historic documentation of female blacksmiths that goes back centuries, and includes some women who owned their own shops. Check out some of these articles: Women's Work, With all the Grace of the Sex, What Women Blacksmiths Wore (featuring Aislinn Lewis!), and Pre-20th Century Female Blacksmiths. It seems evident that female blacksmiths were more common than we imagine, but still rare enough to be of note. 

And it's still that way today.  I remember the day my neighbor hollered at me from his porch, "I done never seen a WOMAN blacksmith before!" (nevermind that he'd probably never met a blacksmith of any sort before). My father joked weakly that I was taking up blacksmithing to meet men.  I have met men.  Almost exclusively men. And they're generally spectacularly awesome people.  But I notice every time I've ever encountered a woman wielding a hammer.  Still rare enough to be of note.  And that's not even mentioning the visible lack of diversity in skin color, disability, age, etc. 

Here's the thing: a lack of diversity breeds a lack of diversity. The idea that "my sorta people don't do this" can be a whisper in the back of your head, or shouted at you across the street.  It can be wrapped in a joke, or coded with additional adjectives ("FEMALE blacksmith"). You may be celebrated or ignored because of things about you that have little to nothing to do with blacksmithing--often things that aren't even under your control. And so, even if you think that blacksmithing would be fun to try, it can be just a little bit harder to get around to swinging a hammer. Culture is a big bully. 

I started Ms Caitlin's School in 2015.  I started it in part because it's a passion of mine. But also because I want to provide a counter example.  People like me DO blacksmith.  And so can you. 

I'm tremendously excited to work with anyone and everyone who walks through my door. I'm doubly excited if that helps to increase diversity within the blacksmithing community. So I hold classes specifically for women. I'm trying to reach past that voice that whispers "people like me don't blacksmith" and say, "Everyone can be a badass.  Come play." 



Upcoming classes for women: 

• March 18 & 19, 2017 in Vergennes, VT
  
• May 20-22, 2017 in Starksboro, VT
  
• June 19-21, 2017 in Lake Luzerne, NY