It Starts with Wire and...
My goal is always to create useful, practical items that are just a touch out of the ordinary and made of equal parts know-how and physical material. My maille all comes to me as straight wire, which I coil and cut into perfect circles and then weave into all kinds of things.
As a child my mother taught me to sew and embroider, and I learned to crochet out of a library book around the age of 12, all the while nursing a secret enthusiasm for all arts obsolete. Jewelry also came to me at about that age in the form of beading and a Saturday morning class for middle-school aged kids, and I found it an accessible and portable way to bring novelty and imagination to every day life, as well as a great way to keep my hands busy. Metalwork didn't come to me until college, and then it was in the oddest of ways. I took a course on Middle English literature, and was told that for the final assignment I would need to write a paper on "The Quest," which was a spiritual theme as much as a plot in many of our reading assignments. The catch? As research, we would each have to go on a small quest of our own.
Never one to miss out on an opportunity to push a theme too far, I immediately went back to the dorm and searched the 2005 internet for "chainmail." I knew that making things by hand was an integral part of who I was, so for my research I would explore that aspect of myself by learning a new craft from scratch. My first rings were made from copper wire wrapped around a pencil, and the bits of chain produced were duly pinned to cardboard, labeled and presented with several pages of personal reflection to the professor.
I did okay in that class for a freshman. But I also started my small business in my dorm room, with coils of wire piled under my desk. The next year I joined a historical fencing club, and became a volunteer in the blacksmith shop at a living history museum. After college I went to trade school for fine jewelry and got a job in the jewelry manufacturing trade, but I still like to come home and explore all the ways to combine those little circles, and create things that are as interesting as gold and diamonds but accessible to anyone who likes to wear a little fantasy. In the near future I hope to grow my business a bit and begin combining chainmaille with my fine jewelry training, but I'm taking it one step at a time, because as silly as it sounds, there is really no other way to get through a Quest.
