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Aberrant Artificer

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Date Uploaded: September 27, 2004, 7:56 am
Last Edited: December 29, 2012, 5:20 pm

Petal Maille

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[ Hybrid ] [ Weave Tutorials ]

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For this tutorial, I will be using 16 gauge rebar tie wire, which is mild steel with a black powdery and somewhat gooey substance on it. The rings made of this material will be 3/8" inner diameter (ID). The other rings will be made of 14 gauge galvanized steel, more commonly known as electric fence wire. These rings will be 5/16" inner diameter. This leads to an aspect ratio of 4.88 for the big rings and 7.38 for the small rings.

For preparation you'll want to prepare a quantity of 95 rings of 16 gauge 3/8" ID and 42 rings of 14 gauge 5/16" ID. This will be exactly enough material to complete one rosette, a hexagonal form of Petal Maille.

The first step will be to close one of the 16 gauge rings. Make sure your closure is near perfect, for bad closures destroy the overall look of a completed piece of petal maille. Take another ring and pass it through the first and close it. Turn this ring up or down, the choice is yours.

However, you will need to turn every other ring in the same direction or the Mobius Balls will not sit "flat". Pass a third ring through the first two and close it.
Turn this ring in your previously decided direction and pass a fourth ring through and close it. Lastly, turn the fourth ring to sit well with the others and the fifth ring through the other four and close it.
	This second step is most of the work involved in knitting this weave. Repeat the above step another 18 times. You should now have 19 five-ring mobius balls that all flow in the same direction. If you look at the mobius balls from above, the center should look like it corkscrews in one direction or another. At left is a sample of six mobius balls. If you want to complete a full rosette, you should knit all 19.
The third step is basically linking all 19 mobius balls you have prepared together in one long chain. Think of the mobius ball as one ring and link it to another of the mobius balls in a 1 in 2 chain. See the picture to the right of five balls.
Now that you have a long chain of petals, the mobius balls, you are able to begin joining them together into a pattern. Petal Maille is based off of Japanese 6 in 1 and that is how the mobius balls are further joined. From this point on, every time I connect one petal to another, the connector ring is a 14 gauge 5/16" ID ring. See the pictures below outlining the repetitive steps to create a rosette. The picture on the left is how the chain should look before you add the connector ring and the picture on the right is how the chain will look after you add the connector ring.






To construct a full rosette, just keep adding to your chain and connecting it as shown above. Upon completion, you'll notice the patch you've made is very flexible. This weave is ideal for any kind of garment you'd like to make.