So, welcome!

Oh, dear, I have a blog now... :)

Well, it sounded like a good idea to have one as my amazing hobby took off into entrepreneurship realm, so I made one. By coincidence, it happened just around one significant anniversary, my first year in the world of chainmaille. Good sign, right?

So, it was October 2012 when I discovered this exciting technique that immediately took my heart. You know, I was never a craft-oriented person. All my life my creativity bursted in some other areas and I have never developed skills nor even deeper interest in any craft. Earlier that year I realized I need... something. A calming activity of my own that will take me away from stress of everyday life. I had an urge to do something with my hands and to feel productive. So I started researching.

I spent summer trying several different crafts and the results were, well, miserable. You should have seen my experiments with polymer clay, omg what a disaster that was! I will probably feel the deepest respect for polyclay artists till the end of my life. And decoupage, too. A 7-year-old could do better. Quite discouraging, believe me.

Then I stumbled into chainmaille somewhere online and decided to try it. A bag of rings and a pair of totally inadequate pliers and the magic simply happened. Pieces of the puzzle simply fell to the right place and the big beautiful picture appeared.

Picture taken on October 11th 2012

I still wear my first piece, a Turkish weave necklace with an orange silk cord in the center (the size of the rings was totally wrong, so I it was quite hollow and I needed that cord to keep the shape).

My second project was already fully wearable Orc weave copper bracelet, the one on the picture. It's in my mom's possesion now.



So, it was all about finding the right medium. I helplessly fell in love with working with metal, I like its strength and roughness. My 'math brain' enjoys dealing with shapes and connections between them. And my passion for medieval history also outbursted in using this ancient technique to make something beautiful and usable in modern age.

Viking knit triple necklace

A year from that moment my craft still excites me deeply. I've never expected this journey to happen and I've learned soooo much. Many, many new weaves - luckily, there are still many more to learn. I've learned the Viking knit, too. I plunged into the unknown world of online selling and that was a challenge itself, I struggled with business plans, had to define the market, to choose the right venue, to take good pictures, to learn SEO... what a simple jumpring can make of one's life, huh?


A year from that moment I have 3 shops: on Etsy, the biggest marketplace for this kind of goods; on Zibbet, the fast growing handmade venue; and DaWanda, the multilingual Europe-based handmade market. And, oh, dear, I have a blog now :) Looking back, all I can think of is 'Wow! What a journey!'.

From now on, I'll try to share the steps of that journey here with you.

A place where magic happens...