I explore the roots of STEM education in Victorian books on home science and leisure crafting. I propose that gendered domestic learning spaces during the Victorian period created two powerful emblems of making things: “the forge and the fireside.” This way thinking about gender, science, and technology remains salient in STEM education today. As depicted in books published explicitly for boys or girls, Victorian girls should gather and share information through conversation around the hearth, while boys tinker in workshops adjacent to the home. I will investigate how the spatial organization of “forge and fireside” reflects the gendered practices that children learned for both creating new knowledge and crafting new things.