Learn to make Chainmail

The wire I used for making the bracelet is fine for that but obviously it must be strogner metal to make a shirt for my son. I’ll have to see what I can find and the cost. In the mean time, I will keep working with the jewlery wire to see if I can make a headpiece. Then I need to figure out an anklet.

I searched out everything I could find online about making chainmaille. (Hey it’s the Ren. Faire wench in me I guess.) My aim is to make chainmaille jewelry and a shirt for my son and a coif for my hubby…well, you get the picture. I got the wire and tried but ti wasn’t coming out right. I poured over pictures and such to no avail.

Than last night as I was snooping around, I discovered the problem…a matter of the lay of the weave!!! So tonight I sat down to try again. I had difficulty in some steps mentioed so I worked out my own way of working it and guess what??? I know am the proud owner (and creator) of a simple 1 inch wide chainmaille bracelet. No beads or pretty things. That is the next step. Then on to fancier weaves!!!

I started doing this last week and I’m already close to finishing a shirt. Here’s the tools I used:

2 pliers
1 dowel rod
Box of finishing nails
Square piece of inch-thick plywood
Bolt clips
Hanger wire (also called ‘deck tie rods’...I found these in the bathroom aisle at Home Depot, oddly enough)

Note that all of these are hand tools. This means that you’re going to be twisting and bending metal by hand if you follow my steps…I highly suggest wearing gloves to take some of the strain off and to reduce callouses.

Anway, the plywood and nails might seem like odd materials for this. What I did was mark off a grid on the plywood board, then nailed in the finishing nails, each an inch apart. This made a sort of chainmail ‘loom’ for me to put the rings on, so I could keep track of them while I was putting them all together. It’s not really necessary, but it did make the job a lot easier.

To actually make the rings, you take the metal wire and you wrap it around the dowel rod. If you have a vice, you might want to secure the rod on the one side. Once you’ve coiled the wire around the rod, you’ll have something that kind of looks like a spring.

Next, you’ll use the bolt clips to cut a line down the ‘spring’ you’ve made. This is how you get the rings. Using the two pliers, you then need to bend the ends of the ring together to make one unbroken loop.

If you’re using the loom idea, the rest is fairly easy. Just fill the loom with nails, then connect every four rings together with another ring. Just remember to have the pattern of the rings match—if the middle loop goes under two rings and over the other two, do it that same way to the rest of the rings on the board.

And that’s pretty much it!

Most people think of chainmail as a “guy thing” or something heavy that you wear in combat. I make chainmail jewelry for my friends as gifts. It is easy to learn how to do and you are guarunteed never to have the same gift as someone else. And there are so many patterns you can do for chainmail, I have made over twenty bracelets and none of them look the same. I made a spiked one for a male friend and then made a nice dainty one my grandmother wears.

No real reason for this, except that chainmail stuff looks cool :) There’s lots of tutorials on the net that I’ve downloaded, but never got around to trying it.