User blog comment:Blood Reaper/Skyrim Crafting your Own Weapons/@comment-173.61.27.130-20111116131214

You can make your own armor, weapons, and jewelry but you need the ingots of each material to form them. Right now my smithing is level 54/100 and i am trying to get up to 60 so i can upgrade my magical items' armor and weapons as well. However, getting the ores from markets and vendors is cheaper, it's 6 gold for iron ore as opposed to 18 gold for an iron ingot. you can smelt the ores in a smelter, there's one in whiterun or whiteguard? but finding ores in the wilderness is extremely hard. i read somewhere that for orichalcum [orcish ore] you can only find it in places where orc strongholds are, and if you aren't an orc it sounds like you'll have to kill everyone to get it. >_< however, for iron it's fairly common in mines, i haven't found malachite ore or ebony ore, but i've found some conundrum ore before, and adding that to iron ore makes steel ingots. i usually buy my ores and ingots from the market, however i am still trying to find more places.

As for ores IN mines, they're just specially colored areas of rock and if you view one they give you the option to mine for an ore, you can get up to 3 ore per rock when you mine, usually you get 2. Hope i was helpful :D i'm still looking wherever i can for information :S