Makai, Mauka

Edison B. Weahkee from Zuni Pueblo making jewelry, New Mexico

A blacksmith is a generalist, a person who uses tools and fire to work iron.  Some blacksmiths work more specifically, so you get, say, an architectural blacksmith, who focuses more or less exclusively on things like gates, rails, fences, or an artist blacksmith, who makes wacky sculptures or what have you.  These days, though, that’s a pretty blurry line.  ‘Blacksmith’ is a pretty damn broad term, but it’s nowhere near broad enough to cover everything encompassed in ‘metalworker’, which is how I often see it used.  There are a LOT of different skills for working metal, and no one knows them all.  Some other terms:

A farrier shoes horses.  They may make the shoes, or they may buy them and then size them, but they actually do the shoeing.  Unless the blacksmith is also a farrier, they don’t know shit about horses’ hooves and are not qualified to deal with them and probably don’t want to.

A blacksmith works IRON (or steel), usually almost exclusively.  They might work with bronze or do a bit of brazing, but those are really separate skillsets.  If you work, say, tin and/or pewter, you are in fact a whitesmith.  You could also be a silversmith or a coppersmith, and so on.

Knifemakers and swordsmiths have their own highly specialized and fairly complex specialties, and usually a blacksmith wouldn’t mess with that unless they want to pick up a new skillset or if they’re really the only game going for a long way around.  By the same token, a swordsmith might never have learned the more general blacksmithing skills.  They’re not the same thing is what I’m trying to say here.  Likewise armorers.  There’s overlap but it’s not the same thing.

If you make metal items via molds and casting, you work at a foundry and are a foundryman.

and then he wanted to go over all the gemstones in the shop and talk about their reiki properties

sometimes he’d buy a sword and i’d make all my sales for the day right there and then

we sold these tiny frogs (“african dwarf frogs”?) in these ittybitty environments (which were obviously inappropriate and probably terrible for them) and about an hour of my day was devoted to checking all the tiny tanks for any grey froggies that went belly-up, we had 1 case of what i’m pretty sure was attempted froggy cannibalism followed by death, and one time our entire shipment of frogs just showed up dead and it was p tragic

we also sold man-candles, wine glasses, hot sauce, potpurri, dragon statues, sexy fairy statues, and salt lamps. 5 of the folks that regularly came in for gemstones told us our shop was haunted but i believe em about as far as i can throw em so you know what

y’know