From Rings to Ready-for-Battle: Crafting a Chainmail Shirt for a Lady Knight Look at VA Ren Faire

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⚔️ Timestamps ⚔️
00:00 - Intro
00:23 - Gameplan
03:07 - Strategy
04:24 - Making Chainmaille
06:12 - My Chain Shirt Journey
09:33 - Respond to Lauren Does Cosplay’s New Tutorial
14:48 - Final Push
15:40 - VA Ren Faire Recap

⚔️ Music Credit ⚔️
Celtics in Disguise - Trabant
Mural Legends - Adriel Fair
The Wedding Feast - Bonnie Grace
Old Scottish Town - Trabant
A Path Well Trodden - Jon Bjork


⚔️ Voiceover Transcript (limited by character count) ⚔️
Hey, it's me, Hannah.

This weekend, I'll be attending the Virginia Renaissance Faire at Lake Anna Winery. So for this video, I am going to take inventory of the armor that I have and figure out what else I need to do in order to fill out this lady knight Ren Faire fit. Okay. Let's talk about base layer. So it's not exactly cold here, in mid-May, but I don't think I'm really going to have to worry about like getting heatstroke if I wear boots and leggings. So that's kind of probably option number one for me is just a pair of black leggings and I've got some kind of over the knee boots that are low heel, definitely a go to for me when I wear more of a knightcore look.
I also tend to reach for this white blouse when I am donning my gorget and pauldrons, although for this faire, I do want to wear a chainmail shirt. So I might opt for something lighter. But in general, this is not it's not a heavy shirt. Relatively light fabric. I think it's just kind of a lower quality fabric. It's not pure cotton or anything like that. So this is what I'm going to plan for for now. I mentioned them before, but I definitely want to wear my metal gorget and pauldrons. So that means I will not be wearing my scale male pauldrons even though they are black and would go really nicely with my black leather bracers that have this really cute heart detail on them that are going to be perfect for a romance theme. I am very excited about that. But I guess it'll still work with the silver accents on those bracers, matching the silver on the metal armor and the chainmail. Speaking of which, my non scale chainmail is in a bit of an unfinished state right now. The back and front are different lengths. There are no sleeves. Things like that. So I am going to spend some time over the next few days working to make this shirt at least a little bit longer. I haven't exactly decided what shape I want the chain shirt to be in. But I will probably either go with taking the bottom of the front and back panels down to a point so that it kind of drapes between my legs a little bit. Not not too far down, but enough or flip it and reverse it, bring it down on the sides to cover my hips with a little slit open up in the front and back, probably starting just below my waist either way, because I only have a few days to work on this. I'm just going to get started and see how far I can get.
My hands already hurt so badly. Basically, my strategy thus far has been close a bunch of rings, create a bunch of 4-in-ones, and prepare to put them all together. This seems to kind of universally be the strategy when it comes to
creating chain mail. That's not to say there aren't a million different ways and really amazing patterns you can use while creating chain mail, whether it's armor or jewelry or clothing or whatever. But at least when it comes to using the four in one pattern, it seems to be pretty universal that we create a bunch of four in ones before connecting them. And I'll show you how to do that.
I'm using bright aluminum jump rings from Chainmail Joe This bag was full and it comes with about 1700 rings. So it's going great. I find that these 14 gauge five and 16 inch jump rings are my preference, but they the rings come in a bunch of different sizes. This is not sponsored content, but I do enjoy working with these rings and I enjoy that I can get them pretty quickly. I have another bag or two coming in the mail today, so just in time.
This is a labor of love. This is somehow self-care for me, which is hard to believe considering how bruised my hands are already. I wish I was keeping track of the amount of time I'd spent on my on my shirt. There has of course, been a lot of trial and error. This is basically the same shirt I've been working on for over a year and a half. I wore it a few times as sort of a crop top and really enjoyed that shape, but decided to keep adding on to it rather than starting a new piece to hopefully save me some time. But once I got the shape to where I wanted it to be, it's mostly just been about adding to the bottom to lengthen the shirt because I have the plate armor to cover up certain pieces of it. It's not been a huge deal that it hasn't been full length. But I, I am ready to have a full a full maille shirt. So and a full...