How To Make A Roman Chain
I love to make chains! There is something soothing about the repetitious work. I guess it’s sort of like knitting, something that I can’t do at all! ☺ Learning how to make a chain is great because once you to it, you understand it and can decide when to buy them and when to take the time to make them yourself. There are some pre-made chains I would never bother to make because to get them that perfect is not a good use of anyone’s time. Leave it to the professionals! But you can’t get the look and feel of a handmade chain in a commercial chain. Period.
Adam and I made a Roman chain, also called a foxtail chain. It’s simple but you can vary the look depending on how thick you make it. And you only need two tools: a Micro torch and pair of round-nose pliers! Here are my tips with some excellent help from chain mail artists:
Always use FINE silver, not sterling. What we showed was how to fuse the wire so there are no seams. It’s a technique that takes some practice until you get the feel for it, but basically you wind wire around a dowel into a coil, cut through it perfectly, take each individual loop and line up the two edges so they are nearly perfect, and heat the ring until the silver on each end melts together. Give yourself some time for this. You will melt a lot of rings at first, and then it goes really fast. I find that if you start with thicker wire, like 20g, it’s easier because the wire can take more heat.
Check out this link from Silverweaver, a site of awesome chain mail jewelry by a wire artist named Spider – it has perfect pictures with a beautiful chain resulting from the technique. While the weaving technique is different and more complex than we show, the other steps are the same.
For our chain, once you have your links, you stretch them like Spider shows you, make them into little butterfly shapes by pulling the taut in your pliers, and then bend them in half so they are ready to weave. Here’s a nice clear set of directions from another cool chainmail artist on how to do the actual weaving. You can see his links are perfect.
Once your links are ready, put your feet up, get your favorite beverage, and hunker down for a leisurely night of TV or DVDs. In a couple of hours of weaving, you will have a killer chain. All you need is a clasp. For something pre-made, I like a lobster clasp or toggle clasp.
If you find you’re into this, THE book to get is Classical Loop in Loop Chains by Jean Stark on Brynmorgan Press. So many killer designs! It will keep you busy for years.
