Patterns for the Chainmaille Balls

Maille Stuff

I'm assuming that you have a vague familiarity with how to make maille before this starts. If you don't, your best bet is to look about online for a while. I've put a few links here (links! geddit?), but there's a whole big world out there just by looking at google

You will find many many references, no two of which do it the same way. Knitting maille is like anything else related to skills-with-your-hands or arty type stuff. You look at a bunch of different ways of doing stuff, and run with what you like. It's a COMPLETELY personal thing.

For the record, my personal taste:

• I use a pair of vice grips to hold the wire on the rod, and use them as a lever to turn it. Kids, I cannot overstate how important it is that you wear gloves and eye protection. This shit HURTS.
• I use straight-cutting aviation snips to cut the wire. Two notes that I have discovered are important:
  
  1. They cut with a shear, not a pinch
  2. They're the cantilevered sort. It'll take twice as much travel to get the same cut, but it also requires half the pressure.
• I like to use one pair of straight needlenose pliers in one hand, and a bent needlenose pair in the other. For these size links, both pairs are 6"

Raw Materials, Intro

Basically, all the rings in this are inside diameter 5/16", and they're 16 Ga. AWG.

In plain English, buy a 5/16" steel rod [cold-rolled, if you can find it] and a bunch of 16Ga galvanised steel wire at your local home depot. It's standard, cheap, stuff.

At some points in my descriptions, I will refer to "trumpet rings". If you don't know what they are, they're simply rings that you add in, between a pair of normal rings.

eg, in european 4-in-one, if you have three rings in one row, two rings in the next row will connect to rings (1 and 2), and (2 and 3) respectively. A "trumpet ring" is a single ring that you attach to just ring 2. It's so-called because if you keep adding them, then the rows get wider and wider, in a kind of trumpet shape.

Patterns

Larger Balls

Smaller Balls

Future Directions

Well, these balls all suffer one major drawback - that they're made from galvanised [as opposed to stainless] steel - they do kinda leave a dull grey on your hands after a while, and they're not as strong as I'd like them to be.

So here's some other exciting ideas for future experimentation:

• Stuff spherical pieces of chainmaille with silks instead of wrapping it round a ball [thanks to Paul Jimenez for the idea]
• Stuff sperical pieces of chainmaille with basic, long, chains of simple links [thanks to Justin Reese for showing me his]
• Square cubes made from japanese 4-in-one [something I saw at Renassance faire]
• Make them from triangular japanese 6-in-one, giving hexagonal faces to a regular solid, instead of a square. Sounds much harder, but I really fancy that one :-) [my own idea, as a natural extension of the previous one]
• Something else I saw at Renaissance Faire, take a bunch of those large stainless steel chiming balls [the chinese things you get for 4 bucks at hippy shops], and loosely wrap two layers of maille around them. These are SWEET toys

PS More chainmaille stuff I made can be found here: http://icculus.org/~chunky/device/

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This page last modified: 2004-03-08