This project came about because a friend of mine from The Pas, Manitoba, was giving me a tour around the town, and had mentioned that her friend had a thing for dragonflies. I was showing her some of the chainmaille things that I had made (if I'm not mistaken, I had Octavia and Charlotte with me). She challenged me to make a dragonfly keychain for her friend from chainmaille.
I started out by trying to figure out the wings. I looked at a few pictures of chainmaille dragonflies online, and saw one where the scales where held on by a semi-tangle of twisted wire. I don't know twisted wire, but at first glance it had looked like foxtail weave. So I was like 'CAN I make this out of foxtail?' And thus it went. It took me a bit to get that weave going again (trying to stretch and work with 3/16" rubber rings is REALLY difficult), and I eventually wove the scales into it. One on the end, one in the middle, allowing me to make the thinner, longer wings of a dragonfly. The rest more or less fell into place. I wanted to make it using mainly rubberized rings (I only had black available, so it's a bit of a darker dragonfly) so that it can squish and compress in your purse on your keys, and made the body using boxchain weave, and transitioned from 3/16" to 1/4" rings for the body. The head is, for lack of a better description, a semi-tangle of green AA rings which look nice and head-like ^_^
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| There was a little bit of fanangling to get the wings to look how they do, deciding how far up the foxtail I should put the scales to get them to stretch out well, and more or less just *HOPING* that they would lay at least somewhat flat to eachother, to give the illusion of a single long wing. It turned out to work well, so I was happy! I was running out of options for the wings, I had tried just putting 3 or 4 scales together with regular E4-1, but they were both floppy, too thick, and didn't look good, so I quickly scrapped that. Really, foxtail was about my only bid lol. And it worked! The rest fell into place fairly well, and the keyring was attached with a handful of 18ga 5/32" rings. He turned out really well, in the end! He ended up being named 'Tyrogue', as I was watching a lot of Pokemon videos on YouTube by Scykoh, and right near where I finished, a Tyrogue was in play. And so, the name stuck ^_^
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