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About Hand-Woven Chain Maille
All of Black Hound Jewelry's chain maille is hand-woven. This means that we use prefabricated rings, called jump rings, and "weave" them together to form all of our chains. We use very few hand tools, often just pliers, and only one electrical "appliance," which is a rock tumbler that is used to polish and clean your jewelry before we ship it to you. This hand-weaving is what gives your piece its crafted appearance and is what makes it so different from the chains that you find at most department and jewelry stores.
The weaving process uses rings formed by wrapping a length of wire around a circular object of a specific diameter, called a mandrel. This spiral of wire is then cut or sawed into individual rings, which are opened and closed as they are woven together. Because of how the rings are fabricated there will always be a single cut through each ring, which means that putting too much stress on the woven chain can cause the rings to open, resulting in broken jewelry. Fortunately, each weave intertwines many of the rings of the piece, which spreads any stress out across the entire piece. For example, most of our Japanese weaves have each ring passing through at least 2 other rings, and frequently more. In addition, we often mix materials to provide added strength to our chains. For instance, we typically mix stainless steel rings with aluminum rings in our Byzantine chains because the stainless steel rings make the chain more durable.
While we strive to ensure the quality of all of our rings, they are prepared for us by third-party vendors and we have little control over their processes and practices. We do our best to ensure that none of the rings that we use in our jewelry suffers from any kind of material defect or obvious blemish. Many of the aluminum rings are dyed as part of their finishing process, which is what gives them their vibrant colors. However, the rings do not always accept the dye to the same degree. This means that you may find slight color variations in the rings of your piece. Please consider these variations a sign of your piece's uniqueness, the same way that hand-crafted wooden objects are unique because of each tree's individual grain pattern and texture.