I found it was cheap enough to buy weapons to use as smelts

Now if you have level all gloves, you may smelt these to get 1 - level 11 smelt. You may use the seven souls gold Level 11 smelt on armor or weapon, level 11 or lower.

Smelts have a high failure rate now. Just get your item up to +3. Reason is that if your smelt fails to upgrade to +4 your armor or weapon is ruined or destroyed.

You should know that weapon smelted give you TWO smelting stones and armor smelted only gives you one smelting stone. Up to level 25, I found it was cheap enough to buy weapons to use as smelts, so I could have +3 weapons and +3 armor.

You can not smelt any item that is upgraded. REMEMBER, I recommend NOT using smelting stones till you can use weapons at level 9 and armor at level 10, at a minimum.

Well since you are a low level, Level 2 to Level 10, there is not much you can do. But if you can leave your computer all night on, you can cut herbs all night.

What you do is to buy one knife for your class. Go to Dratan, out the south gate, until you hit the foothills. There to your right you can see an herbal garden. You cut here on the magic bush.