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About a week or so ago I mentioned that I would be starting my journey into making chainmail jewelry. A few of you guys (2) expressed interest in seeing my journey, and I got my materials today. Materials required: Pliers x2 Rings, size depends on your pattern, or "weave" Patience, lots of it. Weave instructions The whole thing is mostly just learning technique, and your very basics is learning how to properly open and close your rings. So I spent my first half hour opening and closing some rings to get the feel of the movement of the pliers, and how much force I need to put on them to close the rings properly. When opening rings, you push inward so that the ends of your rings overlap, then when you pull it back to close the ring and line the ends up so they meet. Overlapping the ends when opening them causes the ring to keep that shape, so when you close the ring, it keeps a nice and neat seam when closed. Once you've gotten the hang of opening and closing your rings, it's time to take up a basic weave, I decided to start with a simple 2-in-2, extremely simple, and can be used to make earrings, bracelets/anklets, or necklaces. This 2-in-2 chain is going to be a bracelet, and I have started on what's called a Helm Chain as my first lesson in weaving rings through a chain. Will get some images up soon, there aren't that many formatting buttons for creating a new thread.

Here's what I mean about "closed" and "open" rings. The rings on the top left are closed, while the rings on the top right are open. The 3 at the bottom are what's called "raw", they aren't closed nor open, they are as-is out of the bag. This was my first chain, a very basic 2-in-2. Some weaves go by "(Name) X in Y" where X and Y are numbers of rings, in this case, it's that 2 rings are inside 2 rings. I have another pattern I'm going to attempt which'll start off as part of a Half-Persian 3-in-1, so there'll be 3 rings inside 1 ring. And this is my Helm Chain. It's a variation of a standard 2-in-2, but you can see it's got that extra ring in the middle. I couldn't attempt a Helm Chain with my first 2-in-2 chain because I didn't have the right aspect ratio of the two rings I was using. It was fine for that chain, but I couldn't get the black rings to fit over the silver rings in the first chain, so I started this new one. This is my first practice at weaving rings into a chain. My color selection is very limited, I have another set of rings that are light blue, but my color selection will be expanding later. So far the only troubles I've had is starting a new chain, once the chain has been started, it's a rather easy affair, but starting them is a pain in the ass.

shouldn't you spoiler that