The Middle Ages were a rough time for everyone, but lawyers were especially vulnerable — the pen is not, it turns out, mightier than the zweihänder. Medieval lawyers were therefore dependent upon their expertly crafted chainmail armor in order to survive attacks from opposing counsel, unhappy clients, or people who had just watched productions of Henry VI.

The complete chainmail lawyer collection.

It’s all about the Abrahams. This lightweight, durable wallet comes complete with card holders and notepad. Try using the chainmail pen below to write in it.

This dragonscale tie is not just fashionable — made of steel and copper, and coming in at a total weight of 1.2 pounds, the tie easily doubles as a short range weapon, ideal for repelling any nun-chuck wielding ninjas that may attack a courtroom in the midst of oral arguments.

Guarding the pocketbook is a timeless concern. With this European style chainmail covered checkbook, your negotiable instruments are safe from stray bullets and/or meat cleaver strikes. Plus, in a pinch, when unfolded, this checkbook doubles as a 8″ x 7″ chainmail shield and/or bludgeon.

What corporate warrior would be complete without a set of business cards?

Not having any colored rings, my initial plan was to either use a sharpie on or paint individual rings and build the writing into the weave itself. I was deeply annoyed to discover how bloody hard it is to color aluminum rings yourself — the sharpy ink rubs off immediately, and if you paint it with enough coats for it to not be rubbed off, the rings become too warped for a snug weave like this business card uses.

My annoyance later evaporated, however, and I became deeply grateful for how easy paint comes off of chainmail, when I made an extremely unsuccessful attempt to paint “ViewfromLL2.com” on the card. And it turned into a gigantic painty mess. So I doused it in hot water, cleaned it up, and went with a simple “LL2” written on it instead.

Finally, there are few things more precious to a lawyer than their blackberry. How else will they know at 11pm if an unhappy partner needs them to come back to the office immediately? Plus it is only one eighth as lame as all those other cellphone holsters on the market, so if you must advertise the fact you are a complete tool by carrying your phone about on your belt, at least switch to a chainmail pouch.

Here you can see the blogyer (blogger/wannabe-lawyer) in her native habitat — the desk where she applies to jobs from. With her sturdy lawyer armor, she can battle against any judge or tortfeasor that dares to get in her way.

Although lawyer chainmail armor is intended to intimidate legal opponents, as demonstrated by this photo and the previous one, it does carry the risk that you could be mistaken for a waitress who does not know how to center her tie, or else a parking enforcement officer that you really do not want to mess with.

Next: And for more chainmail, check out Chainmail for the Medieval Kitten.

-Susan

Chainmail Stats
I only started chainmailing a few weeks ago, so most of the items in this post were learning experiments that I did to get a feel for how some of the basic weaves work. I’m happy with the way some of the projects turned out, but pretty much all of them have some major issues that I’ll now know not to do again. So I wouldn’t really recommend making anything the way I made it. However, in case anyone else out there is interested in chainmail and curious about how these things were done, I included the descriptions below.

Wallet: Body is 14g, 7/16″, aluminum rings, done in King’s Mail 9-in-1 with a twist. To make it stiff, I skewered each column with kabob sticks, except for the columns on either side of the spine. The internal chain used to hold in the cards is a jens pind chain made of 16g, 3/16″, copper rings. The outer stripe for decoration/clasp holder is made of bronze rings, 18g, not sure of the ID, done into a half persian 3-in-1 chain.

BlackBerry pouch: 16g, 1/4″, galvanized steel body topped with copper rings of the same size. European 4-in-1 weave, with a very poorly constructed bottom. And okay, fine, it was actually intended to be a dice bag, not a blackberry pouch, but by pure chance it fit my phone perfectly.

Tie: The main part of the tie is dragonscale, done with 16g, 3/8″, galvanized steel for the large rings, and 16g, 1/4″, copper for the smaller. I would not recommend trying this — done with the same metal for both scales, it is very tidy looking, but done with the copper, the pieces don’t quite fit together right, so the rings do not overlock into each other as smoothly. Still has a nice scaling effect, though. The knot of the tie is made of two half persian 3-in-1 sheets, one right handed and one left handed, and joined in the middle. [Close up on the knot available here.] The neck of the tie is kind of shoddily put together, just European 4-in-1, but you can’t really see it when it’s on, so I didn’t want to put any more time in it.

If I were to do it again, I would definitely change how I hooked up the tie to the knot. The way I did it causes the whole thing to buckle weirdly when worn as a tie, so I used a few rings to jury rig it into staying down. So it works now, but it’s not as clean as I’d like it to be.

Also I would have made sure I had large copper rings left over to use in the knot so it wouldn’t be a different color from the rest of the tie.

Checkbook: The checkbook is just one sheet of 16g, 5/16″, aluminum rings, woven into European 6-in-1. The kabob skewers used in the wallet were originally used to jabs holes in the check book. My original plan of weaving the entire sheet into the checkbook faltered when I discovered I was incapable of making rows of holes even enough to build the weave into. So I opted just to link in about eight rings, and it works well enough.

Pen: Not too happy with how the pen turned out, and I would most definitely find a new way to do it next time around. I was trying to give it a “pencil” look with the tapered copper end, but it ended up looking like test tube beaker. It was also the biggest pain in the ass to make of all of these items; closing the silver tube and getting the top to clasp the copper point took forever.

The silver part is 16g, 5/16″, aluminum rings. Weave is a twisted King’s Mail 9-in-1 done into inverted round. The point is 18g 9/64″, copper rings, made into European 4-in-1 inverted round,  topped with two rows of 20g 1/8 copper rings to give it a very tiny opening.

Business card: 18g, 5/32″, aluminum, European 4-in-1. This one will be tried again when I get my hands on some anodized colored rings, and can try weaving the writing onto the card itself.