Chains Again...

It's been a long time since my last post, but I have been working away busily as usual. May, normally my favourite month, was full of disasters that distracted me from my work, and now it's nearly the end of June and I'm just beginning to recover.

It's nearly 'New Designers' again, I can't believe a whole year has gone since I did it! Now my friends from a year below me at college are stressing and working hard, and I know how they feel. It will be great to go and see what they have made.

Today I did a few experiments with copper wire for chain making. I was curious as to the ratio between  the loop size and the length of chain they made. So so I took six lengths of 20 cm each of copper wire (1mm) , and made 6 different sizes of links (the sizes on my looping pliers).

Here are the results (the links were flattened) :

Copper chain lengths

There may well be a chart or even a mathematical way of calculating this, but maths is not my thing. 

The nicest proportion of wire diameter to link size is loop no. 3 (the third from the left). 

Loop no. 4  is probably the most practical because it uses fewer links. 

The longest chain is 6 cm long, but the one I would make (loop 4) is about 5 cm long - so you need to buy 4 times as much wire as you would need chain! Useful if I ever wanted to make a chain in gold...

These are my looping pliers by the way, I call the smallest 'bar'1 and the largest 6.

OK, back to my sea glass now...