Finding a class, or a group near you

The craft pages on this site describe what happens at the anvil: how iron moves inside a narrow band of heat, what each tool is for, in what order the operations come. The difficulty appears in the first minute of work, when a reader with a hammer discovers how much a sentence leaves out. What follows is about the other half of learning: the room where the corrections happen, and how to find it.

What a page cannot teach

Reading about drawing out and upsetting supplies the vocabulary: a bar can be made longer and thinner, or shorter and fatter, and finished work is some combination of those moves. What the page cannot do is watch the strike. A blow landed off the mark, on metal a few degrees outside its working window, with the hammer face not parallel to the work, leaves a flaw no text can see. Forging is a chain of judgments made in seconds, and judgment is trained by someone standing close enough to say: wait for the color, then hit there. That proximity is the whole argument for classes and for groups.

Eight smiths and a notebook, 1973

The pattern was named by accident in March 1973. On the 16th and 17th of that month, Alex Bealer, the author of The Art of Blacksmithing, and the Westville restoration village in Lumpkin, Georgia, hosted what they called a Blacksmiths’ Convention. About twenty-seven participants attended, most of them from the Southeast. Late on the first night, eight of them sat trading knowledge, and the arithmetic at that table became the rationale for what followed: each smith gave one tip and got seven back. One of the eight, Dimitri Gerakaris, went to his room at half past two in the morning and wrote a proposal in his conference notebook for a loose organization held together by a publication and occasional meetings. He read it aloud the next day before lunch. Within ten years, the membership ran into the thousands and around the world.

From a convention to an institution

The loose organization is now the Artist-Blacksmith’s Association of North America, ABANA, which has kept the founding year in its tagline: Forging Better Blacksmiths Since 1973. It is registered as a 501(c)(3) non-profit and describes its primary function as education, inside the blacksmith community and beyond it. The catalog is concrete: workshops, technical and art publications, grants, awards, conferences, exhibitions. Its public pages pair contemporary work with historical context and state the aim of raising awareness among architects, designers and the public.

Where does knowledge actually change hands?

Nationally, by ABANA’s own account, education runs through a curriculum, grants and a calendar of events. Locally, it runs through registered affiliate groups, which the association calls the heart of the blacksmithing community. The support flows in a precise direction. ABANA sends group leadership a monthly newsletter carrying event information, marketing tips and news from other affiliates, and it helps affiliates build up their own educational programs. A separate publication, The Quench Tank, serves affiliate leadership specifically. A photograph on the affiliates page shows members of the Great Basin Blacksmith Guild working through the National Curriculum with Mark Aspery, one of its instructors. The design is plain: the national body does not operate local forges; it feeds the people who do.

How do you find the group nearest you?

The association maintains an affiliate directory, a listing of locations and contact information for local affiliate organizations, with a plain invitation to get involved at the local level. It sits one click from the resources ABANA publishes for its affiliate groups, a page of tools that covers finding an existing group, a media kit, archives of affiliate newsletters, and the steps for a group that wants to register as new. The same page distributes single-page news sheets that affiliate editors may reprint in their own newsletters, one set valid through June 15, 2026, and three more through November 1 of the same year. Where ABANA stops, this journal keeps a short page of guilds and related resources.

What a class adds to a curriculum

The National Curriculum, on the association’s about page, is described as a path that teaches, evaluates and certifies blacksmiths in traditional forging skills, and certifies instructors as well; the program is nationally recognized. A curriculum supplies sequence, which matters more than beginners tend to expect, because the operations build on one another. What it cannot supply is the eye: the color that says iron is ready to move, the sound a hammer makes when the blow is true. Those come from repetition watched by someone who already has them. One caution belongs here: the association’s pages publish no guidance on protective equipment or shop safety. Those questions belong to the instructor in the room, asked before the first fire is lit.

Find the group before the anvil

The tools pages on this site carry a standing warning: the costly early mistakes in a forge are the anvil, the fire and the vise, bought for looks by people who have not yet struck anything. The order of operations matters outside the shop as well. Before the first purchase, do one thing. Open the affiliate directory, note the groups within a reasonable drive, and write to the nearest with two questions: who teaches beginners in the region, and whether the National Curriculum is taught there. The Great Basin photograph shows the second question can find a yes. Then the buying can start.

ABANA, the Artist-Blacksmith’s Association of North America, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit founded in 1973 at a blacksmiths’ convention in Lumpkin, Georgia. Its site holds an affiliate directory with locations and contact information, a National Curriculum that certifies smiths and instructors, publications, grants, awards, and news of conferences and exhibitions. Subscribers receive two to three emails a month on average.