Hear ye Hear ye

Love making chainmaille, be cool if I actually made some once in a while.

[epileptiform]

if you see hardware on yhe ground like a washer or a hex nut you have to pick it up because it’s lonely and scared. if you see any metal on the ground you have to pick it up because it’s alone and scared and lonely.

[epileptiform]

they are deserving of love

[oblivionscuttle]

Holy crap, I think is my favorite thing I've ever made!

[faerosejewelry]

one of my recent pieces, isadora

⋅˚₊‧ 𐙚 ‧₊˚ ⋅

[booksandchainmail]

How do you make a fidget rose? I saw the one you made on craftexchange and I need this in my life!

so I originally backengineered it from an etsy listing, but it looks like in the past couple years someone has made a video tutorial!

I've skimmed through the video and it looks pretty good and close to how I make them, I'll add some notes on the differences in my process/general tips. Honestly, this is tricky to describe through text. You'll probably be better off using the video, which seemed quite clear and lays out a color pattern to follow.

General tips:

If you haven't done chainmail before, you'll need two pairs of pliers to start out with. Ideally you want flatnosed pliers that don't particularly taper near the tip (so you can get a broad grip on the rings) and that don't have grooves (so they don't scuff the colors of the rings)

You'll also need rings: it's possible to make these yourself but I always just buy mine. I've been getting mine from theringlord for ages and that's worked well, though caveat that I've heard their quality control has slipped in the past couple years (I've noticed this myself but only on one color/size).

For rings, you'll need a larger size for the center and a smaller size for the ones that spin. The video has some sizes listed in the description, I personally use 18swg 9/32 for the large ones, 18swg 3/16 for the small ones (these are the sizes I use for chainmail jewelry in general so I already had them on hand). The size of your rings will impact how many you need.

The basic process of making chainmail is you hold a ring using both pairs of pliers, and twist one front and one back so the ring opens. Then you loop it through wherever the pattern tells you, then reverse the motion to close it. There are plenty of tutorials in various formats around the internet. It's generally quicker to open a bunch of rings at once so you have them ready to go while making the piece.

Specific tips:

The video does a good job of walking through the pattern, which is actually pretty simple. You're essentially just alternating six small rings with one large ring that passes through all of them.

The one difference between how she does it and how I do is that I use a quicker but trickier technique. Essentially, for almost any chainmail pattern, you can start by having a pile of already-closed rings as well as open ones. Then instead of adding rings one by one, you add multiple closed rings through each new open ring you add, speeding things up.

For this fidget, I actually close all the small rings, and then add them by looping them in with an open large ring. So I'll take an open large ring and start looping it through the set of small rings on the end of my fidget, adding a new closed small ring between each existing small ring. This is hard to describe, and also trickier to do. If you're just starting out with chainmail, I'd recommend using the technique in the video, at least to begin with.

The real complication in this pattern is getting the colors correct. The rose essentially consists of two spirals that alternate rows, and if you're doing a color pattern like in the video or the one from craftexchange you need to know which color is going to be where before you start, since you're adding a segment of all six rows at once. Here's a diagram that should hopefully make it clearer:

this only shows three rows, but you can see how they make a complete spiral? The orange at the right of the top row feeds into the yellow at the left of the middle row, and so on. This is because you make the fidget as a strip, then loop the ends back around to form a complete loop, so the colors need to progress in order.

so for the actual fidget, you'd have two of these spirals, alternating rows. You can do these in whatever colors you want but I personally enjoy doing entirely separate color patterns on the spirals. The rose from the craftexchange has one spiral in warm colors and one in cool colors, each cycling through both saturated and pastel shades.

If you like the color pattern in the video, just following it is probably simpler for a first try. I mostly use one of my existing roses as a model when making a new one so that I don't have to figure out the colors from scratch. If you are doing your own colors, I'd recommend mapping it out like the diagram above before starting.

To map it out, you first need to know how many colors you want, and how many segments per row. I'd recommend having a number of colors that does not divide the segment number evenly, so that colors don't sync up on multiple rows (I just think it looks weird that way). You get 3 times the number of segments total in a spiral, so that value has to divide evenly by your number of colors. I normally go with 6 colors and 8 segments per row.

Once you've filled out your color chart, you need to know how many rings each segment should be. This entirely depends on your ring size, and will determine how loose/floppy/spinnable the fidget is. For the one in the craftexchange, I went with 7 rings per segment, for a total of 56 rings per row. If you get to the end and don't like the sizing, you can go back and add/remove one ring per segment, but it's annoying to have to.

Alternately, if you want to keep the colors simple you could just do the whole thing in one color, or have each spiral in a single color.

IMPORTANT: when you start adding rings, make sure they are slanted the correct way, or the color progression won't work. As you progress along the rows in your diagram, new rings should slope up and to the right when you look at them (if you have them sloping the other way, all the patterns will be backwards when you try to join them

lastly, joining the ends is going to be annoying. You have to maintain tension while getting a ring in place, it's fiddly. In the video she uses a drop of something to label which rings need to be joined, but if your color pattern is distinct there should only be one set of rows that makes sense to join up.

Good luck! these are some of the best fidgets I've encountered.

[toskarin]

one of the more upsetting things you notice if you look back at older european weapons is that nobody fucking named any of the types of flail so you've gotta describe them by appearance every single time

[toskarin]

me: this is so clearly a distinctive and recurring type of flail that would have to be used in an entirely different way than a normal flail. people fought with and against this hundreds of times. people died to this. they had to have a name for this. it CANNOT just be called a flail again

over 700 years of european history:

[thursdaysrain]

meanwhile in polearm land

[vraska-theunseen]

just over halfway done :)

[vraska-theunseen]

finished him !

[blodfilth]

it’s me and my 5 diy projects that ruin my hands against the world

[vraska-theunseen]

just over halfway done :)

[nutsandseed]

chainmaille quilt squares. because all I ever do is make chainmaille, make quilts, or make some crossover between the two

[momocoeli]

decided to learn how to chainmail just to make this

[tenuguitied]

Hobbies are great.

[stag]

ball-jointed doll by 山丘里的羊 on xiaohongshu.

[aanxii]

Teeth of the Valley

[mailling-it-in]

Finally got some nice pictures of all my bee-chains! It’s fun to make them with glow in the dark scale wings too.

Ramblings under the cut:

I wanna make some other bugs, but I’m honestly not sure what people would find recognizable? Fireflies and dragonflies maybe…

I could also paint something translucent over the clear scales, and I know people sell like, iridescent plastic scales in different colors but …when I look at those sites, all I see is a lot of plastic and it makes my brain go “the first step is reduce!!! Reduce, Reuse, Recycle! Don’t buy them!!” I’ve seen people make some beautiful pieces with those scales though so idk, maybe I’ll buy some and test them out.

[fateschains]

a personal project ive been affectionally calling the "love bite" set: a half persian 4-in-1 necklace with a heart ring and a stacked necklace in odin's eye with accent hearts, steel cones, rhodium letters, and a puffed filigree heart pendant

[estrangeloedessa]

Couple test strips of the gay/mlm flag pattern. I haven't made this one yet bc it poses the same problem as the aro flag but more; it needs three whole shades of green and my cable links only come in one. I supplemented with regular jump rings for the dark green, as well as the dark blue for balance, and simplified to just two shades of each color. Right uses aspect ratio 4.0 rings, which are the right size to carry the spiral weave pattern through, but also bulge out from the chain. Left uses AR 3.5, which keeps the width of the chain more even, but can only fit a 1-1 connection between flags which interrupts the spiral and might lay wonky. The test strips are to figure out which version will feel less disruptive.

Bonus, finished earrings:

[mailling-it-in]

Making stuff for pride! Cat ears, I’ve only made a few pairs of these but realized I had the right scales in non-binary colors so.

The ear pattern is from “ ThinkingWitchCrafts “ on Etsy. A well written pattern, would recommend it!

[shutyourmoustache]

PLAGUE! PLAGUE! PLAGUE! PLAGUE!

[vintageandroid]

OOPS gotta reblog this one to bring it to the GHOST FANDOM.