Halflings and Woodies, don't miss this!

[Kadin]

I have not seen any guides anywhere that mention halfling sewing kits as a skillup route. The Economical Smith suggests the Wood Elf kits as an alternative route, but I'm saying that Halfling kits are a superior route even to what is suggested in that much-lauded (And, don't get me wrong, **** nice!) guide. I trivialed out gold ornate, less the tunic, and was looking into some sort of a bridge to delay having to spend hours and hours farming for leather padding. Gave my Vale Sewing Kits a shot....everything for them is vendored. As a cleric, I made a swift journey of it by binding in the Iksar smithing room in PoK and Gating and Faithgating back and forth from that spot to Rivervale to make the sewing kits. They cost about 6pp per combine, mostly successes starting from 146 skill, and I probably made about 50 of them to get to 162. They also only cost me abou 6pp per combine, and only required two subcombines per. The catch? They only sell back for less than 1pp, if you have the patience to run back and forth to the nearest vendor as you make them and sell them one at a time. Myself, I just dropped them on the ground and left 'em there.
But in the end, a 6 plat loss per combine was very refreshing after exiting ornate chain, which I did without a geerlok since that would take my unbuffed wis from 355 to 335 and I'm too cheap to buy KEI. I wish I had started on it sooner, say, after I trivialed out all the one-ring ornates. Definitely something for you other halfling smiths out there to keep in mind. I do not know if the wood elf cultural sewing kit is a comparable cost, but if you are a wood elf, it can't hurt you to look into this potential time AND money saver as well.
~Kaisei of Stromm

[Cavel]

There are some interesting topics in the General tradeskill forum that suggest if you did start sooner you would not have had as smooth a road as you did.

The long and short of the thread is that you will get a skill up more often on a success than on a failure. So it is better to do items that are closer to your trivial level as you will by default have more success with those. There is also info about how there are 2 checks done for skill ups one based on success and a second based on failure and if your Primary stat is high it increases the chance of skill up on failure.

All in all though you had an excelent run! GL to you in your future smithing!

[Kaaba]

If you are a Karana worshipper, steel arrowheads are a better skill up route. Got from 130-188 smithing in 2 hours for like 2k with my druid. Wish I knew about it back when I was skilling up with my ranger :/

[Myrron]

My guide casually mentions the vale sewing kits (step 10b) but since I'm a wood elf, I had no firsthand knowledge of them when I originally wrote it. I've also heard about the karana-only smithing option (see above post) which is supposedly real good.

--Myrron

[Tweedledea]

As an iksar, you can imagine how thrilled I was to find the Karana only arrowheads in my autolearn forge.