The end days. Corporations have collapsed. The cubicles are deserted. The networks are down. The supplies of food vouchers are nearing their end, and arrays of disoriented office workers are fighting for the remaining scraps.

Now is the time when you wished you had learned something other than COBOL.

Something that gives you an edge over the competition. But there is no more database to be manipulated, no more code to be reviewed. All you have is cubicle walls, paper clips and stacks and stacks of laser printer ready paper.

"Wait. Did you say paper clips? I might teach you something that'll save your sorry backside from these maniacs with the paper shears and the red swingline staplers. But you're gonna need a lot of paper clips..."


How to build a paper clip chainemaille

Now, building a chainemaille is easy. It's made of rings. It just takes a bit of wire, a round stick to roll it up on, a side cutter to cut it into individual rings... and a few months full of long lonely evenings, preferably in a dark castle, somewhere in the remote quagmires to follow the assembly instructions.

The most common pattern for such a maille is the 4-to-1 pattern. That is, every ring is looped through four others. Using paper clips, this would look like the following:





You will admit that this looks damn good already.

Now paper clips are not rings, and you will soon notice that there are two significant differences.
a) They are not rings.
b) They are not rings.
Difference a) will reveal to you that they are not symmetrically round, but elongated. They also have an inner loop which sits asymmetrically in an outer loop.
Difference b) is simply the fact that they are open. And especially the outer loop, which has less inherent strength tends to let loose of the other rings you have hooked it to, and attach to others that seem more attractive.

In short, your standard 4-to-1 pattern will not have much resistance in the orthogonal direction:



Blimey. So you will have to reinforce it, and make sure that it cannot extend too far. The easiest way to achieve this is by weaving in horizontal rows of tightly attached loops of even more paper clips.



There are a few simple rules to follow when working with paper clips, but they should leave you room to experiment:
- A 4-to-1 pattern is very stretchy in the orthogonal direction, and almost not in the parallel direction.
- A chain of paper clips attached via their outer loops can compress, but this allows for a lot of movement, and turning of individual clips
- A chain of paper clips attached via their inner loops is strong and rigid.
- Attaching paper clips with their outer loops is easy, even if they are otherwise constrained by being built into patterns already.
- Attaching paper clips with their inner loops will require either to turn them 360°, or to slide other clips into their inner loop by clever combination and movement.
- It is always advisable to start weaving from top to bottom, whichever part of your chainemaille you are assembling. Adding to your patterns from the side or criss-cross becomes increasingly challenging the denser your patterns are.

I might prepare a few more detailed weaving instructions if requested, but I really think you should experiment a bit on your own and see what works best for you.

Here's an arm for you.





After the arms, I made me some bling.





..which should become the beginning of the body. The body would be an overcoat with a collar and flat weave on the front and back. This would allow me to slip in from one side, and still slip my hands into the arms attached to the collar without stretching too much.

My original plan[1] was to have this finished for our office Christmas party, to cheer the people up who have spent the last years disassembling paper clips from a million of documents and collecting them into buckets (six in total). They were required to do so by the fact that we still receive a lot of paper clips (our office has an own zip code, just to give you an idea of the mail volume), while all documents are to be scanned (sans clip).

The buckets full of clips were eventually left in the foyer for employees to take a few. Which I did. You never know when the apocalypse cometh. (But if you happen to live in Norway and be in need of a few more bags of paper clips... or need to equip your next LARP team... it seems I have a bit of a surplus.)







[1] The original plan resulted in a slightly embarassing scene of me defending myself against a gaggle of entangling paper clips in our office restrooms (no witnesses, no pictures). So I had to fix the shirt at home and engage in a more private photo session instead.