Chain-mail jewelry is exactly what it sounds like: jewelry made from hundreds of interlocking metal rings like the chain-mail armor worn by medieval knights. It's very attractive to both men and women who like to wear jewelry because the individual pieces can be styled to look rugged or lacey.

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Jewelry-makers like it as well because it requires no soldering and only the most basic equipment. To learn it, you just need two pairs of pliers and a huge number of small jump rings. This is enough to get you started.

Later, you may want to attach headpins and beads. Or you may want to try making your own rings. If you get truly obsessed, you can start working with rings that vary minutely according to their inner-diameters.

The equipment may be simple, but what about the technique? Is it simple enough for a beginner to learn? I'm going to answer with a cautious yes. Making chain-mail jewelry can be easy in that you learn a pattern and then you just keep repeating it.

It can be challenging in that it requires good visual-spatial skills. Every time you connect a jump ring to others and close it, you have to do so by gripping the ring on either side with a pair of pliers. So, both of your hands are engaged, and your world narrows down to that one ring.

All the extraneous rings that you've already connected into the specified pattern end up flowing over your fingers like cloth, while you're struggling with your current ring. Suddenly you can no longer see the design in your work, nor can you match it to the book. Unless you can keep the developing pattern in mind, you can lose all sense of which ring goes where.

I have no visual-spatial skills to speak of, so I find it helpful to pin the project on a bulletin board in front of my face so that the rings begin to drape the way they are supposed to. Then I can identify which rings go where.

I can take two specific rings in my pliers, lift the project off the pins, connect the rings, and hang the whole thing back up for a double-check against the book. I also find it helps to mark the very first ring with a twist-tie or ribbon. Sometimes the first ring is where you connect a clasp or other finding to make the chain mail into a piece of jewelry.


How to open a jump ring. See the photo. If you're right-handed, grip the left side of the ring with a pair of flat-nose pliers in your left hand. Grip the right side with a pair of chain-nose pliers in your right hand. The place where the ends of the ring touch each other should be situated at the top of the ring right between your two pliers. Pry the two ends away from each other as if you're tearing a piece of bread. One hand moves towards you and one moves away. Do it gently, but don't be too afraid to open a big gap. You can move the ends back together when the time comes to close them.

The wrong way to open a jump ring. (Not illustrated.) You never want to keep the ends of the ring in the same plane, pulling straight back towards your left and right. This will stretch the ring and you'll never get it to close as securely as with the "bread-tearing" method.

The basic European 4-1Chainlet. Take five jump rings. Four are closed and one is open. Thread the open ring through the four closed ones so it is in the center, and then close it. Its top curve will always pass under the two top rings and its bottom curve will always pass over the two bottom rings. That is your basic chainlet. [1]

You can connect two chainlets together with another jump ring. Take the single jump ring and thread it through the bottom two rings of the first chainlet and the top two rings of the second chainlet. Close the ring. You now have a single eleventh ring connecting two chainlets made up of five rings each.

In my first photo, I've linked everything correctly. Look at the three connector rings in a row down the center of the two connected chainlets. Each of the three connects with its top curve passing under two top rings and its bottom curve passing over two bottom rings.

In the second photo, I connected the bottom center ring correctly. However, I made some big fat mistakes with the middle center ring that connects the two chainlets and the upper center ring. See how weird and twisty the whole thing looks?

What does chain mail jewelry look like? See the first photo above of a dangling chandelier-type earring that I put together complete with pearl beads on headpins. I haven't yet put the post-and-ball earring finding on it yet, but it gives you an idea. It is a diamond-shape pattern that uses two sizes of jump rings in sets of pairs [2]. The doubling up of all the jump rings gives it an intricate look. Note: I will go into detail on this earring project in the next chain-mail jewelry article.

References:
[1] Chain Mail Jewelry, Contemporary Designs from Classic Techniques, by Terry Taylor and Dylon Whyte, ISBN 1579907237, published by Lark Books, a division of Sterling Publishing Co. Inc., 2006. Page 18. This book is available at Amazon.com here: Chain Mail Jewelry: Contemporary Designs from Classic Techniques

[2] ibid, page 28.