Roy Adams resides in Harrisville, Michigan with his wife and three children. Roy’s interest in blacksmithing began in childhood when he watched a blacksmith at his work at Carriage Hill Metropark. He began forging in 2008 after receiving an antique coal forge as a gift from his wife. Roy studied under prestigious blacksmiths such as Thomas Latane, Peter Ross, Clay Spencer, Douglas Pryor, and Wayne Apgar.
In 2012, Roy officially opened his business Christ Centered Ironworks and online store.
Roy has taught blacksmithing classes at the Tejas Art Gallery, Southern Ohio Forge and Anvil club, Goshen Blacksmith Society, Blue Hell Studios, and Tiller’s International among other places. Additionally, he has done blacksmithing demonstrations at the Western Reserve Artist Blacksmith Association’s 2018 conference, Blacksmith Association of Missouri’s 2021 conference, monthly demonstrations at Southern Ohio Forge and Anvil, Dayton’s Urban Nights and Arts Week, Taste of the Arts in Piqua, Preble County Art Association, and Boyscouts Summer Camp. In 2017, Roy received the Ohio Heritage Fellowship Award from the Ohio Arts Council.
Currently Roy has a YouTube channel called, “Christ Centered Ironworks” where there are over 1,700 videos of forging tutorials for all skill levels of all types in addition to videos that help blacksmiths start a business. Roy’s passions in blacksmithing run toward ornamental French baroque ironwork for the home and continuing to share and redistribute knowledge and awareness of the great craft of blacksmithing.
Pete Braspenninx, owner of Phyre Forge, is a graduate of the University of Michigan school of art and design (2004). He is an artist, blacksmith, and educator. His work has been shown, collected, and published nationally and internationally. His work focuses primarily on building shape and line through visual connections and joinery
using traditional skills to make modern forms.
Virginia native Elmer Roush has been a blacksmith since 1975 and has devoted himself to the art full-time since 1985. Previous careers included fifteen years spent working in a coalmine in southwest Virginia (both above and below ground), but Roush concluded that he would “rather burn coal than mine it.” Roush learned his smithing skills in Virginia, and also spent time studying with master blacksmith Vaslav Jaros in the Czech Republic.
Now a master himself, he has traveled around the world teaching, including to Ireland and Australia. Closer to home, he is a past artist-resident at the John C. Campbell Folk School. Roush’s work is highly varied. He makes railings and old-fashioned sign brackets, architectural hardware (exact reproductions and creative variants of antique joints, brackets, nails, etc.), and deconstruction tools for use in taking apart old buildings without damaging the wood. He makes liturgical pieces, including altars and candleholders. He makes a wide variety of tools based on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century models, exact replicas as well as creative pieces drawn from the form of antique tools but modified to the user’s preferences. Roush makes his own tools for use in his forge.
Finally, in a highly localized trade, Roush creates basketmakers’ tools, including froes, spoke weights, and rapping irons, which are used by local basketmakers. Elmer Roush is married to Lynda Metcalfe, who is also an accomplished blacksmith. Metcalfe has taught at the John C. Campbell Folk School and has been an artist in residence at the Appalachian Center for Crafts in Smithville, Tennessee. In her native Britain, she did blacksmithing work for the Tower of London.
