Knitting chainmail
Aug. 8th, 2025 10:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kareinaWoke just after 06:00, went to the loo, took my morning vitamin, went back to sleep till 08:00.
Woke up thinking of Obsidian and how I am now writing all of these post there, and copying each day into Dreamwidth after it is complete (so some days there are running notes made during the course of the day, when there is time for that). I have considered exporting all if my Dreamwidth blog posts enmasse and then importing them into Obsidian, which would take some effort to find appropriate tools to accomplish in such a way that all the metadata, including date/time stamps and tags imported properly. But today I realise that it would be more fun to import them by hand, one at a time, reading them as I go, starting with the oldest, written in 2005, and working my way gradually forward whever I have time and inspiration to do one or a handful. I could even go through and copy old letters I have written from my archive of my old email addresses from when I used to use (I forget the name of the email program I used that downloaded email from the server and organised it into folders based on which of my addresses it was sent to, and if it was sent to a mailing list--I exported all of that data to Thunderbird when that program ceased to be supported, and it could be fun to also read and archive in Obsidian the newsy letters that were sent to friends and family). Then I decided that my future self may do these things, and may also copy over info from the Word Document I started in the 1990's containing early memories of various places.
Woke up thinking of Obsidian and how I am now writing all of these post there, and copying each day into Dreamwidth after it is complete (so some days there are running notes made during the course of the day, when there is time for that). I have considered exporting all if my Dreamwidth blog posts enmasse and then importing them into Obsidian, which would take some effort to find appropriate tools to accomplish in such a way that all the metadata, including date/time stamps and tags imported properly. But today I realise that it would be more fun to import them by hand, one at a time, reading them as I go, starting with the oldest, written in 2005, and working my way gradually forward whever I have time and inspiration to do one or a handful. I could even go through and copy old letters I have written from my archive of my old email addresses from when I used to use (I forget the name of the email program I used that downloaded email from the server and organised it into folders based on which of my addresses it was sent to, and if it was sent to a mailing list--I exported all of that data to Thunderbird when that program ceased to be supported, and it could be fun to also read and archive in Obsidian the newsy letters that were sent to friends and family). Then I decided that my future self may do these things, and may also copy over info from the Word Document I started in the 1990's containing early memories of various places.
Therefore, I spent half an hour or so setting up a lifeline folder structure in this Obsidian, with a folder for everything before moving to Sweden, and in that folder dated sub folders for everywhere I have ever lived. Perhaps they will never be filled with data, or perhaps they will, but now the list of places I have lived exists here, anyway.
Then I got up, did 45 minutes of pilates, and cooked some "gryta" (the word simply means "pot", but refers to pretty much any one-pot meal that isn't liquidy evough to be soup). I had to make a pot of chilli, but we had only one can (ok, box) of tomatoes, so it went a bit of a different direction. Canned tomato and blended beans, plenty of mushroom powder and kale powder, some beetroot powder, some frozen vegetables, somevground sunflower, pumpkin, sesame, and flax seeds, butter, a small batch of egg noodle dough chunks, and most of the spices we brought with us. It came out yummy.
Then I baked a dozen bread rolls with that as the filling, and put the rest of the dough in the fridge to bake later, and the remaining gryta in the fridge for Keldor to eat tomorrow and the next day (I like the cold bread pockets to take with me for lunch, he would rather heat the gryta in the microwave before or after work).
After the cooking mess was cleaned up we put on nicer costumes than we wear for working in the smithy and stone carving and headed over to the festival. We considered looking for the shortcut through the woods, but ad we started walking to where it may start one of our housemates drive by and offered us a ride, so we took it.
As we arrived on site the sun was really beating down hard, and everyone else was delighted, especially after it rained so much yesterday. I, who enjoyed the nice cool temps yesterday, was miserable in the sunshine. So, after only one lap around to look to see what the merchants had, I retreated to my normal work corner under the tent roof. Today Rod and Lucy had set up their sale stuff there and she worked on her Viking mail, showing visitors how it is made.
I couldn't resist asking to try, so I spent the rest of the afternoon learning a new skill and applying it.
They had previously set up the rings ready to knit. They have two types--the ones you can open, which get rivited shut, snd the ones they forge-welded shut. These are tiny rings, with an inside diameter of 5 mm, made after a Viking age find. Apparently, that suit of chainmail had surrived as it had gone through the funeral pyre, and the coating of ash protected them from rusting away.
I haven't yet tried the preparation steps yet, but she explained them as:
For the rings to be rivited:
1. Coil a wire onto the mandrel
2. Remove the coil from the mandrel
3. Use the special ring cutting tool with a slot in it to cut off a ring fom the end of the coil (that slot makes it possible to cut the ring so that it has a several mm overlap)
4. Use another tool to flatten the overlapped section
5. Put that ring on a wire and repeat the process with the next ring
6. After there are enough rings with flattened overlap on the wire, take them to the fire and heat them enough to anneal them
7. After they have been annealed and cooled, put one ring at a time onto the drift plate, with the flat part over the hole in the plate
8. Use the drift to drive a hole through the overlapped bit down into the drift plate hole
9. Put the ring on a wire and repeat with the next ring
10. When there are a reasonable number of rings on the wire put them into the fire to be annealed.
11. When they are cooled, add them to bowl of ready-to rivit rings
For the solid rings:
1. Cut rings as described above, but instead of flatening and punching the overlap, simply forge-weld them shut. (I really want to see this done, so I can do a better description )
The pattern is 4:1, so every one rivited ring is attached to 4 solid rings:
1. Pick up a ready-to-rivit ring and use two tiny pliers to open it.
2. Loop four solid rings onto the open ring
3. Use the same two pliers to carefully close the ring such that the pointy part of the hole in the flat part of the ring slots back Into the hole in the other end of the ring
4. Put a rivit into the hole. You can either do what Rod does, and pick up a pre-cut rivit (3 to 5 mm long) and insert it into place. Or, you can do Lucy's prefered approach, and take a long length of rivit wire, if needed cut the end on the diagonal, and push it into the hole. Then trim off most of the wire, leaving only a tiny bit sticking out to be rivited. While it is much easier to poke the long wire into the hole, I didn't trim my first attempt short enough to successfully rivit it, so I promptly switched to Rod's approach.
5. No matter how you got it there, the next step is to use the first setting pliers, the ones with a hole that goes all the way through, to push the rivit wire further into the hole, by carefully lining up the bottom projection on the hole on the ring into the hole of the tool, and then closing the tool onto the rivit wire, which pushes it into place
6. Then use the second setting tool, the one with a divit instead of a hole, to do the final set of the rivit, by tucking the bottom of the rivit into thst divit, and then squeezing the pliers shut around the rivit.
This process, while fiddly, is surprisingly easy. None of these steps require much hand strength at all.
After completing that first set of 4 solid rings to one rivited you extend it by opening a new ring, sliding it through two of the solid rings (ones that are adjacent to one another), taking care to do so in such a way that the rivit on the new rivited ring will be in the same orientation as the first. Then add two new closed rings to the open loop, pinch shut the loop, double check to see that everything it sitting exactly as it should, and if it correct, rivit it shut.
I repeated this process today till I had a tiny snake 8 closed rings long (so 16 total closed rings, and 7 rivited)
Then I started a new row to begin turning it into a rectangle (three times I needed to cut open a rivited ring when something went wrong. Once because of a too long rivit that couldn't be set properly, but had been too squished to trim, once because I forgot to add two new closed rings, which resulted in one rivited ring doing no work thst wasn't already done by its neighbours, and once because I failed the correct orientation part, so half my snake had rings leaning one way, and the other half the other).
Adding the second row is easier, as the path to slide the opened rivit into its closed rings on the snake is less fiddly than it was for the first part. Even so, i just barely got the second row done by the time they had packed up the merchant booth at the end of the day. This means it rook me probably 3.5 hours to do that much (during which time I made a sale for them, as they were both away from the booth).
Lucy said I could keep the little bit but I have no use for it, so I suggested she keep it.
All in all it was a fun afternoon, sitting in the shade, learning a new skill, chatting with interesting people. I would also enjoy learning all the preparation steps.
We choose not to stay on site after they packed up the market, but just came back to the house and relaxed.
We did take the scenic route home, first following the trail along the lake shore, Then we went up the hill by the church, then the side path between the fields. That route is 45 minutes, so probably only half an hour if we skip the lake part and go directly to the turn off between the fields.
Suddenly it is after 22:00, so I will post this and do my yoga and get ready for bed.
