Chainmaille Celtic Flower Pendant/Keychain

Wow. Just wow.

I know, I am wowing something that I made. But I just had no idea you could do this with chainmaille.

In my first post on chainmaille, I mentioned that I first ran across it three or four weeks ago at UnkamenGifts' Summerfest booth. Instead of buying a necklace from them, as I originally planned, I bought their Celtic Flower Kit. I picked out my colors, and they gave me the exact sizes. I then used their tutorial on Flickr.

Of course, I used cheap rings from Hobby Lobby and rings that I made to weave my first flower. I wanted to be sure I could do it before using the good jumprings.

I found that the needle-round-nose pliers I have have a "tooth" that harms the copper rings I bought. The only other pair of pliers I had was a pair of small needle-flat-nose in bad shape from Dad's toolkit. I needed two pliers to open the copper rings, so I raided his giant toolbox again, and emerged triumphantly with a pair of way-too-big flatnose pliers/clippers. If I am careful, I can use the corner of it as jewelry pliers.

This is the Celtic Flower halfways through it's creation-- it begins as a string of complicated chainmaille knots. It looks like dragon scales, doesn't it?

Then the chain is pulled into a circle. At this point the flower was incredibly floppy.

Here is the completed flower with the "structural rings" woven in.

And then I had fun taking pictures.

I decided to make a keychain that I could put the flower on when I am not wearing it as a necklace:

The chain is an intricate box weave called the Byzantine. Instruction can be found in the "Byzantine Weave" set on UnkamenGift's Flickr.