It took six months for Kelly Gilliam to design and hand-forge this steel stair railing for the Blatner family in West Seattle. The work required paying close attention to her tape measure as well as aesthetics.

Today, visitors enter old Spain through the Diazes' front gate, with warm-toned pavers underfoot, tall banana plants and palm trees overhead, and forge-worked metals where you would expect them. The Diazes' builder, Inglewood Construction in Woodinville, put them in touch with 47 Productions, a Seattle firm specializing in custom metal design and fabrication. The company made nearly all the metalwork for the remodel: stair railings, chandeliers, shelf brackets, curtain rods, fireplace covers and screens, as well as a stand to hold a powder-room sink, hand-worked sconces and hinges, and decorative tendrils shaped like grapevines.

The couple appreciate the ingenuity that fit chandeliers, fireplace screens and brackets into challenging spaces without sacrificing beauty. 47 Productions, a two-floor shop with 18 workers, exemplifies regional businesses that produce both high-end forged residential metalwork and commercial fabrication. Computers play a role in the operation, as do anvils.

Kelly Gilliam bangs curves into a glowing steel rod the traditional way, with anvil and hammer. Her shop space is in Seattle's Black Dog Forge.

Employees design, cut, grind, coat and weld upstairs. The heat is downstairs, where rolled-steel stock is ready for the forge. A mechanical hammer with 130 pounds of impact power can be controlled with a foot throttle to tap or squash hot steel bars. Another power hammer, with just under 50 pounds' impact force, is used for more subtle work.

On a recent day, power hammers clanged, gas forges whooshed, blacksmiths tonged yellow-hot steel onto anvils and slapped it with sledge hammers as Tom Waits' gravel voice rumbled from corner speakers. Yet delicacy abided just below the surface. Blacksmiths also wielded non-marring hammers with rawhide plugs in the business end to achieve the right surface texture. They rapidly turned red metal and hit with precision to square four sides, knowing one misdirected blow could send their effort to the scrap pile.

Even as materials and demands evolve, specialty blacksmiths work much as they always have: They apply muscle and brain to metal and fire. Every blacksmith-made piece is unique, says Chris Flechtner, lead designer for 47 Productions. "Our minds are our pattern book."

WHILE WE STILL may generically call it wrought iron or ironwork, material available today is almost certainly machine-fabricated mild steel. Blacksmiths and other metalworkers commonly have used this alloy of iron and carbon since its innovation in the 1850s. Having fewer impurities, it is in most ways an improvement on earlier metals, though more difficult to hand-work than wrought iron.

A bolted-in-place screen provides both decorative cover and good ventilation for a gas fireplace in the Diazes' master bedroom.

This mild-steel vanity has a granite top, bronze sink and nine smooth-sliding drawers. The mirror is flat-bar steel sanded to a dull finish, mitered and welded. Both are by Ting Design & Fabrication. Lacquer and wax protect vanity and mirror from bathroom moisture.

Being more malleable, so-called charcoal and puddle irons were softer when hot than modern steel and easier to shape with forge tools. They had a fibrous character because non-corrodible slags were part of the metal's structure. Best of all, this true wrought iron had natural corrosion-resistant properties and could stand up to weather for hundreds of years with basic maintenance, useful for bridges and buildings.

Yesterday's charcoal iron is the truffle of wrought-iron true-believers, who buy it recycled and remilled to use for special projects and restorations. Most of us wouldn't know the difference.

WHEN MARY ROSE Blatner and her family remodeled their 1936 Tudor-style house in West Seattle, they decided fancy metalwork would be a good fit — namely, a staircase made of hand-wrought steel with a mahogany handrail and oak treads. All is smoothness and continuity, with eye-catching details in the finish work, including a tendril design. If a staircase can be said to flow, this one does just that. And, of course, it is strong — an asset in a household with four young children.

Blatner and her family met their blacksmith, Kelly Gilliam, at an open house at Black Dog Forge in Belltown, where four smiths share quarters in a former film-storage building. Louie Raffloer, founding blacksmith, has a gentle handshake and an anvil tattooed on his right biceps.

Recently, he was hard at work in kilt, heavy boots and a plaid shirt hastily altered to short-sleeve. Commissions were in progress everywhere, laid out on tables, walls or floor. A large dog sauntered through. He, Gilliam and their shop mates, Mary Reid and Dan Schwarz, share overhead expenses and lend one another a helping hand but are otherwise independent operators.

Hand-worked hinges, bolt heads and hasp add character to a wine-cellar door in the Diaz residence. All harmonize with the home's Spanish-influenced architecture.		A 550-pound solid-copper gate created by 47 Productions' artisans leads to the Seattle garden of Nicholas Heer and Donald Morrisette, where a planting-bed scheme mirrors the oblong shapes on the door. Daniel Yarger contributed to the design. The brownish-patinated copper is protected from weather by lacquer and wax.

Gilliam, in her late 20s, is a petite woman with small hands and large ambitions. She has been a blacksmith for eight years, introduced to the skill by her friend Mary, who had learned from Louie, who had trained with a metalsmith near the Pike Place Market. It is a calling.

Gilliam's tools are "hammers, tongs and mind, the latter being the best tool you can have." She worked for six months on the Blatner staircase, making several trips to the house amid the major remodel to double-check measurements. As she points out, steel won't stretch to fit, so it can be difficult to design to an exact curve when walls are unfinished. Patience is simply part of the equation in artisan work.

Gilliam and Reid are two of more than a dozen women in the Puget Sound area who work as artist/blacksmiths or metal-benders. Women have always been in blacksmithing, says Reid. "If they didn't make the horseshoes, they made the nails."

Two chandeliers by 47 Productions crafted to fit a challenging space have foreshortened arms on one side to give dinner guests at the Heidi and Angel Diaz home plenty of headroom.

BATHROOMS ARE a refuge of warmth and softness; add some major metal and you have a novel environment. So, when a client wanted a vanity, sink and mirror for her downtown condo, Adria Pauli, owner of Ting Design & Fabrication, designed and built a nine-drawer steel vanity and steel mirror frame.

Pauli, who thinks in terms of overall room composition, considered the scale of the piece in relation to room size, how the burnished surface texture and soft sheen of the dark metal would work with the green Brazilian granite top and bronze sink, how she would construct her welds and so on.

The sink stand for a half bath was the first piece the Diazes commissioned from 47 Productions. Custom glass in hand-forged wall sconces contributes to the setting.

Though she sometimes incorporates forged elements in her commissions, this was not a "heat and beat" project. This client wanted something different, so Pauli bent and welded heavy sheet stock to make both mirror and vanity. Along with other projects, it took a few months to complete.

Pauli, who is 28, came to blacksmithing by way of jewelry design, a not uncommon avenue for artisan metalworkers. She learned metal fabrication through informal apprenticeships locally before opening Ting in Georgetown. She works with assistant April Clifford in a compact, neat shop, conventional except for a couple of giant black millipedes in a cozy terrarium on her desk. Pauli bought them on impulse because their armored, segmented bodies are visually engaging, almost steel-like.

"Steel is a plastic medium, to a certain extent," Pauli says. With steel, for every action there's an opposite reaction. Heat or sandblast one side of a piece and the other side may shift. It's tricky stuff. "Straight planes tend to warp with welds, so you sometimes need to stitch your way along to control warp. Different metals react differently." There is history inside steel, Pauli says.

A metal artisan can exact any number of interesting surfaces — histories — from the stuff. One could say ironwork is jewelry — the difference being the house gets to wear it.

Where to find fabricators and forgers

Blacksmith Scott Baugher uses a power hammer to shape a yellow-hot steel rod at 47 Productions. He controls the piston-like action with a foot pedal.

A number of firms specialize in architectural metal fabrication and ornamental forge work in the Seattle area. Here is a glimpse:

• 47 Productions, 206-622-1223

• Black Dog Forge, 206-443-9413

• Company K, 206-632-0509

• Metal Solutions, 206-682-5587

• Teeters Metal-Fab, 206-524-2814

• The Tinman (sheet-copper work), 206-270-8550

• Ting Design & Fabrication, 206-658-1465

If you are interested in learning more about metalwork, "The Contemporary Blacksmith," by Dona Z. Meilach (Schiffer Publishing) and "Metal Techniques for Craftsmen," by Oppi Untracht (Doubleday) are worthy sources.

Dean Stahl is a Seattle freelance writer. Benjamin Benschneider is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff photographer.