Victoria Kershaw likes a joke. How about this: she has created a solid silver chip fork that costs £65.

One local chippie owner is so taken with the idea, he's had two made to give away in a lucky dip to hook more customers.

Victoria, 31, is a designer silversmith and the chip fork shows how you can be intensely serious about what you do without being solemn. She is a rising star in a city seeking to revive its one-time worldwide reputation for metal craftsmanship by fostering sparky up-and-coming talents like hers.

They are now in the middle of an annual festival, Galvanize Sheffield, which this year sees the launch of a new biennial National Metalwork Design Award. It's worth £10,000 and is the most valuable of its sort in the country.

Judged by a panel including the Duke of Devonshire and Corin Mellor of the famous local firm David Mellor Design, it's a showcase for 11 emerging artists across the country who have made it on to the shortlist. Victoria, Sheffield born and bred, will know if she's the winner next week.

Her entry for the awards is a raised silver tea set. It comes with a tray made of concrete. The humour this time is the snug lime green crocheted tea-cosy that looks to be straight out of Wallace and Gromit. This is the work of Linda Maddock, Victoria's mother-in-law.

The daughter-in-law concedes collaboration is not her strong point. "I'm so painful to work for because I'm so fussy. I'm not a knitter and I didn't realise that if I asked for two rows to be taken off the width or the top it meant having to start all over again. When I turned up at my mother-in-law's with a fifth ball of wool in a different colour, I think that was the last straw."

There's some history attached to Victoria's choice of career – her grandad was in the cutlery trade, making knives and forks in a factory. She is very conscious that what she does maintains a strand of continuity in a business that once appeared in meltdown.

The past is all around her. She works in a lovely airy workshop – with a gallery across a courtyard where the public can view her work – that has arisen out of what had seemed the ashes of Sheffield's proud past as makers of products which all the world wanted.

It's one of several similar set-ups in the Butcher Works which were built in 1830 by a company called William and Samuel, edge tool makers. Their rosewood boxes containing planes and chisels were shipped across the Atlantic and helped to build America. They were the second company in Sheffield to make the Bowie knife.

In 1867, a file-cutting machine arrived at the Butcher Works. The 2-3,000 workers who made a living by cutting the file grooves by hand, didn't fancy that. They rioted in this very courtyard and smashed up the machine before moving on to throw bricks through the bedroom window of the boss's home.

By 1920 this was where Frank Turton operated – a man famous for his scissors and the part he played, as a leading light in the Ramblers' Association, in the mass trespass on Kinder Scout in the Peak District. By the 1980s the modern working world had left the Butcher Works behind and its ancient griminess and desolation made it an ideal location for a film based on a Charles Dickens novel.

Now re-born as part of the city's Cultural Industries Quarter it offers desirable living space and is a few doors down from the former works of Geo Ellis (Silversmiths), now a restaurant, which has received that ultimate seal of fashion, a television make-over by Gordon Ramsay. The Butcher Works's £7m redevelopment created 50 flats in the upper stories. At ground level, workshops clustered round the courtyard and the old works chimney are occupied by a jewellery maker, a violin-bow maker, a craft baker and Victotia. This hive of artisan industry is supported by Freeman College, of which more later.

Inside Victoria's workshop the "Little Mesters" – the one-man businesses working in metal who did so much to create Sheffield's worldwide reputation – are still present in the shape of the tools they once used. "When you set out, people want to help. The widow of one said I could have the tools her late husband had left in their cellar. They are priceless."

Victoria picks up a pack hammer and works with it deftly on a silver disc. Part of the handle is black from the other hands that have wielded it down the years. Generations of experience, trial-and-error, have brought it to this pitch of usefulness. At the business end, crude springs hold fast a copper disc with a steel disc mounted on top. "They cushion the blow as you hammer and give it a natural bounce," says Victoria.

She has two large "bottom stakes" to sit at and work on. One is a sycamore tree stump and the other is a large lump of wood that looks as if it might have formed part of Noah's Ark. Sitting on top of that is another antique, a "raising stake" on which the metal is fashioned.

There are racks of other vintage tools which have been given a new lease of life by this latest female version of the Sheffield one-man band. Not surprisingly, the Little Mesters who are still going sound pretty pleased to have her around.

"If you have a technical problem, you can speak to them. They like you to go and see them." So she might drop by to talk to a caster, spinner, turner, forger, or an old boy who knows the business of raising, or photo-etching, or polishing. It took a remarkable mix of individual skills to turn out Sheffield's top products, although in Victoria's case she has the lot.

To become so versatile required commitment from the beginning. "As a student, I worked from nine in the morning until eight at night. I was really boring." She got a First at Liverpool and later did an MA at the Royal College of Art.

Initially she worked with different materials before settling on the one which once provided a living for her grandad. "With ceramics you can work for ages on the wheel, only for it to go flop, or blow up in the kiln.

"With metal whatever you do has to be precise and it will stay." Her first Sheffield workshop was provided courtesy of Yorkshire ArtSpace funded by Sheffield's Assay Office which offered subsidised rent and mentor support. For her present one, the Craft Council came up with an award of £5,000 for equipment so long as she raised an equivalent amount herself plus £2,000 for maintenance.

"This workshop is everything I dreamed of and more. And now there's a conveyor belt of people coming through.

"We all have our own style. I'm quite interested in the quirky, like the chip fork, it's quite cheeky really.

"I like people who have a sense of humour. The domestic and function is very important to me."