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:

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.


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:

Gary (-;

PS More chainmaille stuff I made can be found here:

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This page last modified: 2004-03-08