Tween Blacksmithing Summer ProgramVideo Games. TV. Movies. Comic books.
All good ways to use up time. How about using that time to expend excess youthful energy and develop your tween's full potential as a human being?
How about an activity that will teach them to manipulate their environment and to experience —first-hand— one of the skills that has altered the course of history?
Sound good? But wait—there's more! Your youngster will also improve their hand-eye coordination, patience, control, and aesthetic sense.
We'll keep your tween busy for four hours, and send her or him home physically tired yet mentally invigorated. In the process, we'll teach him or her an ancient art, craft, and science that's nearly as old as civilization itself!
Each session include a break for a snack (which you've lovingly packed in a brown paper bag), followed by yet more hammering. We guarantee your youngster will be bereft of excess energy when they get home.
We'll start by making an S-hook , which involves bending, twisting, curling, chamfering, drawing-out, then continue on with other fundamental techniques, such as splitting, riveting, swaging, and maybe some philosophy: if it takes tongs to make tongs, where did the first pair come from?
Gift Certificates for Tween Blacksmithing Summer Program are available.
5 meetings, 4 hours each, with a half-hour snack break. dates×
Instructor: Carl West
Tuition: $490 per student
Maximum 4 students, one per forge
Please wear proper clothing for visiting or working in the forge:
- closed top shoes
(Preferably leather, preferably high-topped. Sneakers are sufficient...
but sandals, crocs, pumps, mules... are not. If you can see the skin of your foot, or the foot of your socks, it's not good enough.)
- natural fiber clothing
(Synthetics are a risk because: IF a HOT thing touches them it's likely that the material will melt and stick to your flesh, making the burn even worse than it would be through a natural fiber.)
- long pants that cover the tops of the shoes.
(To keep hot coals and bits of steel from getting down into your shoes. Which I hear is a bunch of No Fun.)
Click here for more safety information.
This class is either: If you're interested in taking Tween Blacksmithing Summer Program and it's not on the calendar, please tell us using our Notification-List Page.
Dates and Times:
If none of the dates below work for you (or are already full), we suggest you
Add yourself to the Notification List for this class.
(The notification list gets emailed soon after classes are put on the schedule.)
- not upcoming on our schedule,
- or we've fallen behind in our clerical duties and not entered it in the database.
If you found it on our calendar page, we are planning to offer it on that date.