Smithing, post patch 1.6, cannot be leveled through any legitimate means. It's as If the dev's were trying so hard to prevent boosting of skills, they forgot to add a legitimate means of leveling it. It took me 152 ebony ingots to get from 80 to 95, and if you don't want to go on a endless spree of waiting and purchasing from merchants, there are only about 26 ebony ingots you can legitimately find in the game. I had to clear out Dwarven dungeons endlessly to acquire about 400 dwarven ingots to get my smithing from about 40 to 70, then I had to spam/purchase Orchalium. It's just ridiculous the amount of hours I've dumped into trying to level smithing.

Pfft, Everyone knows a true burly smith makes gold neckless and rings to level up.

Its daft I know but making gold items is now the best way to level.

Kill every single deer, elk and fox you'll see and use their skin for leather bracers. That's fast way to level up in smithing.

Can you not make lots of iron daggers to level up any more? Thats what i did in the end when i got bored of wasting time and money on expensive components.

Devs are wrong about one point, what is not quite balanced is not skill leveling but only the improvement level. Combined to an high level in alchemy this skills are way too unbalanced and they only found one way to correct it, in simply annoying the common player....

I made like 4 gold diamond necklaces to 25-50... then I made 100 iron daggers and 1 ebody dagger for 101.. it took me 15mins :S .... I thought my exp was going up fast also.. No idea how!

Dagger boosting doesn't work post patch 1.6. It would take just well over 9000 Iron ingots (Pulled that one out of my ass) to level it using daggers. It also won't work for leather bracers. Post 1.6 is all determined by the value of the item, not number of items made, as it was pre 1.6. So basically you have to spam tons of valuable items, like gold rings. But this requires you to grind. My gripe is there is absolutely no way to level it normally, like you would one handed. I suppose the same goes for alchemy and enchanting.