Artist, 21, crafts tiny silver links into jewelry

By Erin McGrath

Published: July 24, 2008

At 7 years old, when most girls are playing with dolls, Valerie Mitchell was playing with metal.

Now 21, the Afton-based artist makes pieces of jewelry from “chain maille” links.

“I’m not a very patient people person but I am into tedious things,” Mitchell said. “It keeps my mind busy. It helps me actually think sometimes.”

She learned the silver-smithing craft from her mother, Deborah Dove, but said the pair learned how to weave metal links together to make chain maille pieces together.

“She’s been my motivation,” Mitchell said of her mother. “That’s where I really started getting interested with the construction. I found, later on, that I preferred making chains. It’s been basically a self-taught sort of thing.”

Mitchell begins with spools of silver. She coils the silver around knitting needles and uses a cutting tool to make her links. The process of making the links became easier over the years as her tools and experience improved, she said.

“I started off basically just wrapping the wire around wooden dowel rods,” Mitchell said. “It took me hours to get an ounce of silver links. Now it only takes me three minutes.”

Once the links are formed, Mitchell chooses her chain maille pattern and sits down to work. The process is slow. Depending on the weave of the piece and Mitchell’s patience, it can take anywhere from hours to days to finish.

“It’s something you really have to have at least two hours to sit down and know that you’re not going anywhere,” she said.

Working with metal links a few centimeters in diameter or less can make the process tedious and repetitive. That’s the reason, Mitchell said, she was drawn to it.

“I like things to be systematic and orderly,” she said. “And I was always better at geometry than I was algebra, so I think that’s another reason why I prefer doing this.”

Mitchell is also a self-proclaimed “archaeology nut.” The history behind chain maille, which was formed into armor for knights in the Middle Ages, was another reason she said she enjoys doing the craft.

Right now, making chain maille jewelry is a hobby for Mitchell and something she pursues in between working for Wintergreen Winery and attending Piedmont Virginia Community College.

It’s a hobby she’d like to turn into a business, she said.