The Persian Weave

There have been a lot of questions about the name of the "Persian" weave on various blogs and sites on chain-mail. Many have claimed that it is because it was first in use way back in the Persian Empire, but as many scholars and historians have pointed out, there is no evidence for this.

When I was working at our store Chained Lynx,  in Evanston, IL in the early 1990s, I was playing around with the box weave.  This is that version of the European 4:1, 3 wide, folded over and seamed up the back. As I'm sure you know, it kept frustrating me how the last section would fall over on itself and become 2 links to 2 links to 2 links. I really hated the way it looked, and wanted to do something to stabilize it.

As I was using 16-gauge 3/8 inch rings, I noticed that there was plenty of room to tuck those last few links inside the weave, instead of having them hanging outside it where they could, and did, fall over. I tried doing that, and it worked.

Then I didn't like the way that it was suddenly no longer symmetrical, and so I reconnected all the links on the inside. Up one side, down the other. To my surprise I only needed to do 2 sides to make it look good. I expected to have to do all 4. (Hey, come on. I'd never done this before, and hadn't seen anyone else do it either, so give me a break.)

After successfully getting that silly bracelet to look good, and to my satisfaction, I put it in the display rack and didn't think anything else of it.

The next day a friend of mine, Rita Burke, came in and was looking at the new bracelets.

She spotted that bracelet and said, "That's a new weave."

"No it isn't", I replied. "It's just a box weave." After all, I hadn't thought that I was creating anything new, just fixing something old.

She persisted in her view, and showed me the new one alongside an old one, and you know what? She was right. It was because of Rita, and her love of that new weave, that I kept on making them.

I brought the new bracelet, and many others like it, to the Bristol Renaissance Faire that summer where I began calling it the Persian weave.

Why Persian?

Simple, really. I'm a member of the Baha'i Community, and I wanted to honour my religion. As I realized that calling it the "Baha'i" weave would just sound silly to anyone else, I decided to call it "Persian", which is where the Baha'i Faith came from.

Needless to say, the name stuck.

One little thing that I have rarely shared about this "discovery": I knew that if you took the box weave and removed a row, it would fall into the European 4:1. After Rita left the store, I decided to see what would happen if I removed a row from the Persian. To my shock, it held its shape. This I quickly called the 3/4 Persian.

Still being the curious little bug that I am, I wondered what would happen if I removed a second row. I must have stared at it in awe for over an hour: the 1/2 Persian.

Then, still being curious, I wondered what would happen if I removed a third row. That was when I discovered just how silly I can be, as I stared at a pile of links. (All right. I only removed two, but still. It was rather silly of me.)

A couple of days after that,  I was playing around again and realized that there was plenty of space still left between the links. The 1/2 Persian, as you know, goes up through 1, down through 2. And so I tried going up through 2, down through 2. Again, to my shock, it worked: the 1/2 Persian 4. To this day, it is still one of my favorite weaves.

There are plenty of places on the internet where you can find these weaves, and the many variations on it. One of my favorite sites is: http://mailleartisans.org/weaves/weavelist.php?tags=Persian

Oh, and it was a few years later that I saw a jewelry magazine from the mid-1980's that had a single example of this weave in silver. Aside from that one photo, which only listed it as "chain bracelet", I've never seen any other earlier examples.