I want to master the art of smithing early on in the game so that I can enjoy the skill throughout the experience, and not just near the end of the game when I won't even need the good equipment much anymore. Do you guys have any tips?

I heard making daggers is good since it only takes 1 ignote.

Iron Ingot + Leather Strip = Iron Dagger

Kill animals for the Leather, and buy the Ingots from a blacksmith (or mine them yourself, if you're so inclined). Six hundred and eighty-four Iron Daggers later, and you're a Master blacksmith! Congratulations!

buy iron ignotes from the guy in riverwood ad make iron daggers, you can get to 99 in a few hours, great way to make money too and its fun once you start mining and aking dragon and deadric weapons and armor

No you don't.

Trust me, you really don't.

For the love of talos don't do it!

Buy leather and leather strips at every blacksmith and just spam out as many leather armor pieces as it takes. That and spend your 5 skills per level from trainers on the smith in Riften. Also sleep before every session.

The fastest/cheapest way would be to just keep making Iron daggers. You get the same exp off of them all the way up to 100 and the materials can be bought from any blacksmith shop or mined yourself. If you go out mining kill the animals you come across as well for the hides, you can turn them into leather and get more smithing levels that way too. Just buying iron from the vendors is the quickest way though if you have the money.

As previously mentioned, iron daggers are the accepted way to boost smithing through the roof in a relatively short span of time. I also recommend crafting Hide armour as it only requires leather and leather strips, both of which can be made from pelts found on almost all animals.

If you're looking to make a huge profit in the meantime, then looting a Dwemer ruin and smelting down all the metal into ingots, and then turning these ingots into Dwarven equipment also works.

Go to whiterun (bring like 1-2 thousand gold) talk to the women at the smith shop right by the gate and buy all the iron ingots and leather strips then make iron daggers until you run out sell them back, then wait two days for her inventory to refill then repeat, i went up like 50 lvls in literally 5 min.

Bandit infested mines.

Leather bracers all the way. Just kill every animal you see, then make their hides into leathers. You can get 2 bracers for every 3 leathers, and if you've killed enough animals it should be easy. The more expensive way is just buying iron and making daggers, but seriously, daggers are overrated.

Any ideas on where I can mine my own iron?

Theyre not really overrated.. making daggers is the quickest and cheapest way to max smithing. You could go kill animals for the hides but that takes longer, I prefer this method though since making 150 daggers is pretty lame.

Dwemer ruins, get all the crap, melt make dwemer weapons. At begning make iron daggers, then enchant to. Theres a mine northeast of witherun with lots of iron.

Melting down Dwemer metal and making Dwaven equipment actually sounds really fun. To bad I can't make it until the next perk.