The reasons that BUncle must take pictures with his feet ;lol. The mental imagery makes me grin :D.
I wanted to make it as far as actually having three rows of mail tonight, which is only a step away, but the webcam isn't a great setup, and working the mouse with my foot to take pics is even more problematic than I thought.
(http://alphacentauri2.info/MGalleryItem.php?id=991)
T0 tide everyone following over while I work on this design...
(http://alphacentauri2.info/MGalleryItem.php?id=992)
That stuff will still blister your hands, but it's knitting the heavy 12 gauge links that's murder on them. The callus got over 3/16ths of an inch thick around 1994.
Because of my current chainmail project involving a Barbie-scale prototype, Mylochka dug around and finally found the four other Barbarians she didn't sell off. (Also, bought me two Barbies to work with at the doll show yesterday.)
She doesn't know how the brother front-and-center in the pics below got the sunglasses, but he just looks so much like he's having an indecently good time cosplaying barbarians with his friends that a whole little scene wrote itself in my head:
Fade in on barbarians walking around the con]
(http://alphacentauri2.info/MGalleryItem.php?id=993)
Michael had had reservations about setting foot in public in the costume, not least that 'the metal diaper would look fruity', but his friends said he could be the barbarian chief, the girls assured him that his body looked 'yummy' in the gear, and a few admiring stares from bystanders later, he was getting REALLY into it. Humming the theme from Shaft, he got into his best deep, deep, Isaac Hayes voice.
"Jason; get ready to hand me my sword. That dragon up ahead look like he think he can keep me down, and I ain't asking either of you twice. Ladies; you just keep singin' backup."
(http://alphacentauri2.info/MGalleryItem.php?id=995)
;notes; Who is the man/Who will risk his neck for a barbarian? ;notes;
;notes; SHAFT! Barbarian Shaft. ;notes;
;notes; That's right ;notes;
"Hey white boy with the camera! Sit on the floor and get a low angle. I wanna looomm.
(http://alphacentauri2.info/MGalleryItem.php?id=994)
"Awwwww yeah."
"You got THAT right, baby."
Has anyone actually SEEN Shaft? When the theme isn't playing, it's just not very good.
The biggest problem I find obvious is that it's one-piece, and no man who could squeeze his shoulders through the hip bands has any business making everyone sick displaying his shriveled physique. It has to open on one hip and be tied shut at like the throat, ditch the hip armor strips entirely and sew some loincloth lining or something in to hold it tight there and make speedos concealable (no one should ever set foot out of the house in one of the barbarian getups w/o drawers on, or barbarian porno-time) - or maybe just ditch the torso lacing as multiply problematic (not going to actually fight in it, either) and you could probably step into the bottom part sideways through the side gaps higher up if you're thin enough to pull the bottom up over your belly while you get your head through the neck hole.I imagine that BUncle has endured his fair share of incidents that involve costumed fools blatantly producing pornographic movies in a corner of festivals.
I found a copy in old chainmail stuff -I did a lot of small link chainmail jewelry like earrings and bracelets and rings back in the day- of the diamond-shaped straight row camail that Barbarian Shaft was rocking so hard on the last page. So I just had to pull out the lacings and lay it flat for a closeup shot of the pattern and design.
(http://alphacentauri2.info/MGalleryItem.php?id=998)
-A couple of things to note: the pattern is turned 90 degrees so the mail hangs the long way out towards the shoulders, which is the opposite of the way you'd want it hanging as the top of a mail shirt. At the shoulder tips, I gathered three links into the last and skipped a row, rounding off the shape just a little. If you look close at various barbarian doll getups I've already posted, I did the same with the pointed ends of many or all of the loin flaps.
Incidentally, the barbarian outfits are nothing special without all Mylochka did to tart them up with bracers and boots and such. I went next door and turned this on over to Mylochka with the suggestion that she try something not-naked-barbarian and skip the loin flaps, though I could make a set quickly enough; camails are lovely costume pieces for something as far afield as a Romeo doll done slightly fantasy, and would look great over a tunic and tights, or barbarian winter gear, or medieval soldier/page or something. (She's in the middle of working up bunches of dolls to sell at a local doll show.)
One correction on my last post: while I was there, she pointed out two more barbarians she turned up. The Ken has on a round radial/concentric row camail I still don't recall making at all. He's next to me, and a pic is coming before I unlace the camail for a flat closeup like the one above (and for my own study to figure out how I made it work at that size). It looks pretty good.
I am sure the anal b*tards at the SCA may have a few things to say. But, then again, the SCA probably has a 10 page subcommitee rules on how a 17th century whatever should use a toilet to be "in period" and you can not use the cool toilet to begin with. But, your work is good enough you could vend at a lot of venues like Dragon+CON, Ren faires, etc. All you need would be a van that won't leave you stranded on some interstate and you would make some change. Plus, I would imagine vendors get treated MUCH better than volunteers or roadies.Not that many SCAdians know more than I do about chainmail, I daresay, beyond remembering more of the period names for armor parts (they don't usually know how to make without black leather) - and if they can't process that I'm playing with fantasy designs in this thread, they can go climb a (leather) rope.
Only thing is, you go to a lot of shows where you end up spending more than making. My parents do gaudy fused glass that only suburbanite trophy wives like and many times they break even. Though, these cons, Burning Man, Rens, etc are becoming more and more yuppified.
Eh. I was born to entertain in those stupid things. I'm good at many things, not least waiting on customers, but if I go back, it's as an entertainer, or not at all. Anything else is a waste, notwithstanding that I'd run a very funny booth. I've done that, as shop help in faires.
And besides, its one of those things I do the work for the sake of wanting the end-result, and never learned to love the process; tough to make what your time is worth at all, and not a job, knitting mail 40-or-so hours a week, that I'd want.
Genghis Ken
(http://alphacentauri2.info/MGalleryItem.php?id=1000)
-That, or prehistoric Kilnzhai's prettiest warrior...
Here's the camail/ventail shown on a person in the very first picture in this thread laid flat:
(http://alphacentauri2.info/MGalleryItem.php?id=1002)
Chainmail likes triangles or rectangles with very regular straight rows in the basic pattern I previously diagramed, so round pieces like this require the expansion link trick.
If memory serves -I can go count if anyone cares about a precise number- I did the expansion links in 10 or 12 rows, and you can see a little, done that way, that it's really a decagon or something instead of an actual circle. -Definitely looks fine, worn. If you zoom in close, it's easy to spot along the visible rows of radial discontinuities in the pattern where I regularly added a third link in between the two regular ones at that point in the row, which hung off a single link in the proceeding row -making the above link linked to five instead of the regular four- and linked to two in the next row as usual -making it linked to three instead of the regular four- and thus making the row one link wider and introducing that much curve and the concentric-row shape. One expansion link is very difficult to spot; many, if they're introduced randomly enough to prevent a pattern from emerging.
I concentrated the radial expansion rows slightly towards opposite ends to give it a natural oblong-not-circular shape, as shoulders are wide and it fits better that way - which makes it harder to count at the long ends, but the photo appears to me to show twelve sections/expansion rows.
(As the laid-flat small link shirt suggests, there are design possibilities involving patterns of different-colored links; you could even do crude words and/or images like on an old dot-matrix printer, if you want to do the work of wrapping your head around what goes where in the pattern, and I actually have. More on that in the future. Protip: copper is a LOT more expensive, if you didn't scavenge like me, and not as strong - but a few rows of border out of something like brass is completely period-accurate for a wealthy/vain-enough noble/king, and I need to take a picture of my mail hood...)
Note the larger flat copper ring on the outer right edge; that's a period accurate detail, if it should have been brass; it's the armorer's ring - the smith signing his work with a ring stamped with his name. I go to the trouble sometimes. Branding mattered for smiths, too sometimes, and an artist should be proud enough to sign work...
-I think I'd better draw a diagram (or two) of how the expansion links are worked in, for more clarity. Stay tuned.
I DO have a big headI concur with the above statement ;).
I need to talk about/show link-making from scratch (a roll of wire) and go into the most basic poncho-like design of the simplest sort of mail shirt before we've got a complete beginners' course. -But I've definitely provided a LOT more information already than I started with.I say that BUncle works on accumulating the necessary motivation to complete the tutorial about making chainmail from the simplest materials.
I'd have loved to have been able to look up some of this stuff on the nets in the early 90s when I had to work it out the hard way...
(http://theawesomer.com/photos/2014/07/chainmaille_shoes_1.jpg)
Chainmaille Shoes $265 Buym
PaleoBarefoot’s (http://portal.gost-barefoots.com/en/index.php?section=gallery&cid=30) minimalist PRONATIV shoes give the sensation of walking barefoot, but protect your feet and provide grip thanks to their chainmaille construction. They’re great for hiking and running, even through mud and water.
Read more: http://theawesomer.com/chainmaille-shoes/285004/#ixzz44tn4JC8r (http://theawesomer.com/chainmaille-shoes/285004/#ixzz44tn4JC8r)
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I can't decide if that's a cool idea or a disaster in waiting,I concur with the above statement because it illustrates that the shoes appear impractical. I remember when toe shoes were a fad among the outdoors people.
But I know I wouldn't sit around a campfire in them.
Many versions -not the one pictured, but many- have a sort of multi-part paw-print sole built in; those, at least, would take a lot longer to wear out the bottom. You would totally wear through the links before all that long in the ones pictured, especially running on any paved surfaces.I would still much rather purchase a pair of toe shoes over the chain link imposters in that article.
I might rather have the chainmail footies than rely on someone guessing the size and shape of my toes right...I wonder if the people that make toe shoes could create a mold of your foot to produce the exterior outline.
Fooling with craft shows sounds like a non-starter, even for Mylochka, who's far less of a homebody than I.
-But tell me about what you've been doing, please. Sculpey jewelry or something like that, isn't it? Pics a big plus.