Skyrim Walkthrough: Ep. 5 Fast Leveling Smithing (auluftwaffles.wordpress.com)

Smithing is pretty easy to level because the skill is ranked up fast and easy. It also produces something you can sell, albeit at a significant loss to what you have put into making it. This guide is designed to help you level smithing as cost and time efficiently as possible.

Leveling smithing mostly requires money and a bit of time. This is because in order to do it you have to buy iron ingots and leather, although the leather is pretty easy to come by as long as you don't sell the wolf pelts and other pelts of animals that you have killed whilst walking around skyrim. Some pelts give one leather (wolf and other smaller animals) whilst larger animals produce two leather per pelt. Every city has at least one smith, Whiterun even has two. You can go from city to city making sure that for every four iron ingot you have one leather, as it produces four leather straps which is what we will need for making an iron dagger.

Next you will need to go to a forge. I usually use the forge of the last smith that I bought iron ingots or leather from. Then start creating iron ingots. Once you have selected it the first time, if you are on a pc, you can spam the enter button and click yes on the window that appears. For me a slight mouse movement was required so that the game would register the new click. You can continue this until you reach the required level.

The best weapons are the Daedric weapons. Unfortunately you cannot make dragon swords, but you can make a dragon plate shield. I would suggest going down the right side of the smithing perk tree because that is where the Daedric armor and weapons are. The left side is slightly shorter, but you do not get to make Deadric weapons unless you also go up the right side of the perk tree as you cannot select the Deadric perk after you have reached the dragon armor perk if you have gone up the left side of the smithing perk tree.