FLOYD — It’s no mean feat, making iron do what you want it to do.

But on Sunday afternoon, seven novice blacksmiths were able to use fire and force to bend bars into tools.

“I’ve just never had any formal training before. The only direction I ever had was out of books,” said Jason Kiser, 32, a participant in a two-day smithing workshop over the weekend at Jacksonville Center for the Arts.

“You can read all you want, but to really understand it, you just have to do it,” added Kiser, a civil engineering student at Virginia Tech.

Smoke and the clatter of swinging hammers filled the air in and around one of the center’s shelters as Kiser and a half-dozen others labored away at anvils and forges, producing makeshift cutlery, logging tools and clothes hangers.

“We had to work in our T-shirts yesterday,” said instructor John Riddle. Saturday’s sunshine and spring like temperatures, however, were long gone on Sunday; short sleeves had been replaced by sweatshirts, flannel and Carhartt jackets.

Riddle, a retired CSX railroad employee from Botetourt County, has led workshops in blacksmithing for about four years now. He’ll hold classes this weekend and throughout April.

“This is a hobby,” Riddle said with a wry chuckle. “So I don’t have to sit around in a rocking chair.”

Early in the workshops, he shows new students groups of iron rods he has manipulated in one of four ways. Some were twisted, others “drawn out” or sharpened from a cylindrical shape into a point. The four manipulations, he said, are the basis of just about any application the fledgling smithies would want to achieve.

“I can have them doing pretty advanced stuff by the end of the second day,” he said. “If you don’t have any knowledge at all, this is the place to learn it.”

The forges are largely flat tables with a flame rising out of the center. The fires are fueled simply by coal and a stream of direct air, but Riddle said they can reach 3,000 degrees.

“The more air you feed it, the hotter it gets,” he explained. “Iron melts at 2,700 degrees. You want it up around 2,000 to 2,400.”

With that, Riddle drew an iron rod from a forge, its far end glowing like orange neon, and he quickly hammered that tip into a neat loop.

“That’d take me all day,” said Anthony Huff, of Ducksburg, who joked: “Paul Revere would’ve never made it, waiting for me to shoe his horse.”

Despite their lack of experience, Huff and the others churned out the goods.

Arthur Rodriguez and his son, Alex Hicks, 13, of Floyd, took the workshop together and came out of it with a knife, fork and spoon.

“Flatten it and we’ll square it up,” Rodriguez said as he used tongs to hold the makings of a bread knife steady so Alex could hammer it.

“I do pottery and I’m trying to incorporate some metal,” said David Fenner, of Roan Mountain, Tenn. “Basically I’m making hooks to hang mugs from at the [craft] shows.”

Harley Akers, 16, of Riner, had crafted two ornate replicas of Harry Potter’s magic wand .

“It’s harder than it looks,” he said as he heated a slab of iron he hoped to fashion into a knife for his grandfather.

“You know how you can tell if you’ve had a good time?” Kiser asked near the end of the class. He put down his hammer and held out both hands, palms up. The weekend’s labor had left swollen badges of skin on his fingers.

“Blisters the size of a grape,” he declared with pride, exaggerating only slightly.

For more information about blacksmithing workshops, visit jacksonvillecenter.org.

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