Greenbeast

Just to add, yes you can claim tax back on purchases relating to the business so keep a record of everything and keep receipts/invoices. Personally i have spreadsheets detailing all my income and all my outgoings down to silly things like a few quid on a wire wheel on ebay and every sale i make. Come the end of the month (today for example) i use the spreadsheet to calculate 25% of my income and send that to a savings account for tax. It'll hopefully be well over what i need but i'd rather have spare come april 2013 than not enough!

Tom, definitely make it easy for people to contact you, you never know when it might make the difference between a sale or not. People's ideas whether or not they are likely customers are great inspiration for practice projects, i do that all the time. And yes it's always worth pushing you skills even if there's not a customer on the other end of the job. FYI i'm in a very similar position to you, just maybe a few months further along, i too have a day job and am currently getting tooled up and pulling in commissions where possible.

If you are serious, definitely get a website going and cards printed. Unfortunately my site is still in progress but i gave out dozens of cards at the first fair i did. If you have a full time job already your tax free allowance will have been 'used up', so any futher income from a second job will be liable for tax. You should keep back 25% so that you can cover this at the end of the financial year. You should register as self-employed, i will be registering my start of business as this coming April (start of British tax year). I believe it isn't terribly involved, just a case of informing HMRC that you will have a secondary income stream and to expect a tax return from you each year

Owen, your're funny with your hammers!

nice job, i love the contrast at the ends

It's just been wire cup brushed to remove forge scale, then degreased, that's all. Finishing techniques is an area i need to investigate more

Here's mine,

Yup, simple thing really but not immediately obvious

This might not come across very well in text, many of us could show you in 5 minutes. For your leaf, put a short taper on the bar and then neck down where you want the leaf to start only on two sides over the edge of the anvil. When you've gone as thin as you want for the 'stem' you hammer down the taper on the diagonal t flatten it out into your leaf shape. The length of the original taper will determine how long/thin/fat your leaf is. After that do as george says

I only discovered smithing last year and had never really been an arty type (did ok in high/secondary school) It just occurred to me the other day that i'm doing 'art' now, and i'm hoping to do it full time in the next year or two. It has just crept up on me

wowsers, nice pic

what a ridiculous view point. what was the reasoning? If it's build size then surely there are smaller than average men that 'can't ever be smiths' and that's not to mention the better application of the hammer without raw strength

yeah get the 1mm discs, not too much kerf for 5/8" bar

nice tutorial, really makes me wanna be at the forge trying this out!

Thanks Beth, yeah he saw some of my other candle holders with that texture and asked for something along these lines. Luckily i've got a little power hammer to take the elbow work out of all the hammer pein marks! He hasn't seen it yet so i hope he does too!

It's constructed of 50x5mm bar Thanks!

thanks, yes

Knocked this together for someone over the weekend just gone: I might go with shorter candles to not overwhelm the piece in the end.

Very nice indeed

Love the tool stand, i've been looking at those metal trolleys mechanics have, but they;'re quite expensive for what they are.

i could probably sort you out a copy owen. ;)

i love that, so incongruous

I think size of show and expectation is a little beyond me at the moment but i will definitely keep my eye on what's happening in case i can help out. It does sound like a great opportunity but i only work weekends at the moment and as such, preparing for such a large show would be a big job.

nice one.

Yeah i might do one of these, my first forge (that's just been superceded) was built from a 15kg butane cyl, was definitely over-cautious when prepping the cylinder.