Scalemail - Tumblr Posts

Here's how I make my chainmail dragon tails. You can see it starting as just a few scales linked together, and growing to be a full piece. Along the way there are some shots of the interior tension supports I put into them to keep the tail from folding flat, and also some detail shots of the belt loop attachment. I use the large sized scales from The Ring Lord, linked together with 16 gauge 5/16" inner diameter rings.

I fairly regularly get people asking for pointers or instructions for these tails, and I give what advice I can, but I've avoided doing something too specific. I prefer to leave the messy details as a learning exercise for the reader. After all, I sure learned a lot about chainmail construction from figuring these out.

But there's a consistent point of confusion for people, which I'll try to clear up. Most people seem to start out thinking of it like a sewing project: they make a big flat triangle of all the scales in the project, then they try to connect it up the back. This is Hard, for a variety of reasons:

Because of the diagonal nature of the scale weave, you can't just join up two symmetric edges--either you have to make the piece asymmetric, or you have to add in the center-most column of scales in between the mirrored edges.

Joining it up like that means the expansions happen along the same seam as you're joining together. Keeping track of all these things is hard, especially because the naked edge of the scale weave is floppy and messy.

It's difficult to get your pliers in there to close up the tip.

You can't really get in to the center of the tube to do anything useful like building the tension supports that I do.

Instead, think of it like a knitting or crocheting project. If you've ever seen someone knit in the round, this may make sense. Basically, I start out with a (tiny) ring of scales, and build rows above that one. So it's a tube the whole time, and I only ever have one edge active. But people tend to stall out on how to build a tube.

Oh, and I guess my weave direction for scales may be different from other people's. All the instructions I've ever seen for weaving scales weave from the top to the bottom, with you looking at the underside of the weave the whole time. This is fine for learning, but I found that I greatly increased my speed by instead weaving from the bottom to the top. I look at and interact with the top edge of the weave, and link each scale down to two below it. After all, it doesn't matter if it's hard to see the rings from previous rows, because they're already there, and I don't need to touch them anymore. Anyway, I could go on about the advantages of weaving in this direction, but it'll just get preachier than I'm already being.

I hope this helps anyone who's thinking of trying their hand at making a scale tail! And for non-maillers, I hope the pictures were fun to scroll past on your feed!

Oh, and here is this tail finished. I made this one a while ago, but kind of forgot about posting the progress shots.

I’m opening up for dragon tail commissions! As previously noted, this window to request a commission will be open for 24 hours, from now until midnight at the end of Saturday March 26 (Eastern US time). Of the respondents, I will be selecting 2 or 3 commissions to make. They will be completed by the end of April.

This is not a first-come-first-served situation. All who respond within this window will have an equal chance to get a commission. However, I will not be choosing entirely randomly. My choice of which projects to accept will be affected by, among other factors: how quickly I believe I can complete the specific request; availability of materials; whether the person has inquired about commissions in the past; and personal whims about what I want to work on. I will do my best to be fair, though.

To request a commission, first read my tail ordering guide here. Then, when you're ready, fill out this request form!

Assuming this round of commissions goes well, I expect to open up for another round sometime towards the end of April.

Remember kids, this is why you don’t take photos in direct sunlight. In order for the bright parts not to be blown out, the shaded parts end up in total darkness.

Anyway, this was a heat-colored titanium bracelet that I just shipped out. The bracelet is heated over a flame until it starts to glow a bit, and the surface oxidizes with colors that depend on the heat. Always fun to see what you get. This one turned out with a nice gradient from light blue to rose on nearly every scale. But of course the photos sucked.

I took this dragon tail commission partly to check on whether my wrist was back up to speed. It’s mostly back. I need to be a bit careful with the direction I exert force in. And I did this one too hard too quickly, and I’ll probably be sore for a few days.

Pretty straightforward red and orange anodized aluminum. Red on top, orange underbelly. I think the holes on these scales were shifted a fraction of a unit down on the scales, because my standard 35-inch pattern came in at 33 inches long. Kind of funny how small manufacturing variations add up to something I can measure. Weight is 3 pounds on the nose.

I was happy to have a couple days free that I could make this during, but I’m expecting to go back to being super busy for the rest of the month. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do for my day job, and I’m trying to finish a LARP that I have to run early in November. I’m hoping to be able to open for commissions again in early to mid November.

This dragon tail has a pattern of gold scales branching off the spine, to match the circuitry patterns the commissioner’s character has. 

Green and yellow anodized aluminum scales, linked together with stainless steel rings. It measures in at 33 inches long and 3 pounds 6 ounces.

I'm slowly re-organizing the jewelry portion of my Etsy shop, combining the thin and wide versions of these sorts of bracelets into the same listings. Already did bronze and rainbow, next up is probably blackened steel.

(I'd previously combined the thin ones all into one listing and you chose the metal as an option, but I found that most of the sales were from the individual posts for wide bracelets of specific metals, so apparently that organization scheme was confusing to people.) 

Available here!

A friend recently ordered a bi pride scale maille choker necklace, so here it is along with the rainbow one I keep for myself. I swear the purple is actually purple in real life, the lighting that day was just particularly weird. These are made with large anodized aluminum scales, woven together with stainless steel rings. And here's the Etsy listing, if you'd like one for yourself!                                    

Hello! I've been wanting to give dragon scalemaille a shot (mainly want to make my Dragonborn's tail) but I keep getting stumped on two things.

One: I was wondering if you may have any resources for inner tail support? The way you have yours set up is fantastic but I'm not exactly sure how you did itplus I dont want to copy you exactly ^^' I've seen the videos on how to weave them together but not any on the inside.

Two: For making it thinner near the tip of the tail, do you shrink the scale size at all or just use less scales and pull it closer together?

Thank you so much in advance!! -Kodiak

So the inner support on my tails is kind of complicated, but it grew reasonably straightforwardly from first principles and experiment. When I made my first tail, it was just a tapering hollow tube, and I realized immediately that it wanted nothing more than to fold flat. Which sucked.

The first edit of it was to just add a few straight chains bridging between opposite sides of the tube. I'd noticed that when worn, the tail flattened itself top-to-bottom, flat against the butt. I figured that having the sides of the tail held together would reduce how badly that happened. I added like 4 chains spread along the body of the tail, bridging from left side to right side, and I just adjusted their lengths to match the appropriate diameter at those points. (I think I actually did this with string first, then switched to using simple chains of rings because it would hold to consistent incremental lengths better.)

That worked OK at reducing the vertical squash factor, but it opened the door to the tail folding the other direction, flattening into a vertical eel tail shape. So I opened it up again and added in perpendicular chains, so that looking down into the tail you saw a line of + shaped braces.

Again, an improvement, but not enough to reliably keep the tail round. It still folded, but now at weird angles, and in the spaces between the cross braces. I needed (1) more directions of folding being resisted at each brace point, and (2) way more braces total.

More total braces is easy, you just got to add in more of them.

For maximizing the number of directions of radial bracing, this was approximately my thought process: Start with just joining each pair of opposite scales all along the circumference. That'll leave you with a whole lot of chains overlapping at the center point. So instead of a whole bunch of separate diameter chains, just have one center ring with a bunch of radii chains linked to it. That gives you a wheel-spoke arrangement, which is fine. But what if you joined all of those spokes to their neighbors, to make more of a disc? Then it could resist squashing forces that were not purely diametrical. OK now how do I make that disc structure more efficiently?

The particular structure I came up with is basically a Japanese weave structure constructed concentrically. I know that phrase probably conveys no meaning to anyone other than myself. The specifics of that structure are also so tedious to enumerate that I basically just decided to call them a trade secret. But I think by going through through the basic goals and thought process, anyone else with some patience and determination could figure out an equivalent workable solution.

For the thin tip, I just reduce the number of scales. The tip of my tails is a few rows with just 2 scales in them. These really want to fold flat, and adding in cross-braces to fix that in that tiny constrained space is a bitch even for me, so I'd probably recommend just starting with 3 scales in a row. It would be cool to try blending it to smaller scales at the tip, but splicing together weaves of different sizes is really hard to do gracefully.

Here’s a few scale bracelets made as take-home orders from ANE, back in January. The bi pride flag one with the stripes in the long direction was a bit of fun. The light blue on on the one with lots of colors was a color I got specifically to be able to do the trans flag better, but someone at the con really liked it as its own color.

A pair of dragon scale bracelets I just finished up. Made all in stainless steel.

‘Shudder is a stern tiefling rogue/fighter, originally hailing from the desert city of Calimport. Stepping through a portal mirror, he descended into the Underdark alongside other adventurers to drive back the demon lords. Their quest was successful, but Shudder suffered greatly: He aged by thirty years in the span of a second, was driven insane multiple times, lost his halfling friend and apprentice Fargas Rumblefoot (who turned out to have been Fraz-Urb'luu, demon lord of deception, all along), witnessed the death of his god Kelemvor and - compelled by a demonic gnoll flail - gobbled down a chunk of the corpse of Orcus, demon lord of undeath. The Raven Queen, having taken Kelemvor's place, saw it fit to separate Shudder from Orcus' essence... by slaying him. Having been granted a new chance as an aasimar, he now serves her alone. 

Likewise caught up in the Raven Queen's judgement was Dawnbringer, Shudder's sentient sun sword. Her vessel - a golden hilt set with a brilliant ruby - was shattered, and Dawnbringer's spirit now shares Shudder's body. When called upon, she manifests as a blade of pure radiance in his hand. Both in the madness of the Underdark and beyond, Dawnbringer ever strives to be a relentless wellspring of cheerful hope for the often dour Shudder.’

Thank you Charredlore for providing the excellent background information, as usual :D! Commissioned by Charredlore (indirectly by one of his adventurers).