How can I attach a sheet of maille (chain or scale), temporarily, to a jacket?

[foodini]

I'm doing a bunch of detail work in chain and scale that will be attached to a leather jacket. Obviously, I could just choose a few dozen rings to stitch permanently to the jacket, but I"m concerned that it would then be impossible to dry clean the liner. I assume they have to be able to turn it inside-out and lay it flat to clean it, and that will not be possible if I stitch the weaves to the leather.

A friend has suggested velcro, stitching the rings to the soft side of the velcro and stitching the hook side to the jacket. Maybe it would work, but I have doubts that I can't quite put my finger on. There has to be something better...

 

[Bobbie]

This is a very interesting question and point. I'm going to hang in for others to maybe comment, however, now you have me thinking. I will try to get back with you. I don't think the velcro is an answer but there has to be a better answer.

 

[chainmaillers.com]

Depends how "temporary" you want it and what type of modifications to the jacket you are allowed to make. It also depends on if you are using butted rings or not, stitches can potentially slip through the opening of a butted ring. If you can make more extensive modifications to the jacket and don't mind a little work to remove the chain patches, you could try adding grommets to the jacket and attach the chain directly to that.

 

[Rachel E.]

When I read this, my first thought was also grommets (which you can get in tons of different sizes, even super teeny tiny ones), but like what was said above, you would have to undo a lot of rings when you wanted to remove the chain patches. However, if you instead used tiny grommets as a permanent hole for sewing with a thick thread (or leather cord), you could stitch the patches of chainmaille onto your jacket, and then secure the ends of the thread/cord on the inside on the jacket in some non-permanent way. Then, when you wanted to remove the chainmaille portions you could just unsecure the ends of the cord, and then the cord could just be undone (unsititched) from the chainmaille, which would separate it from the jacket. I have no idea if that makes sense and is understandable to anyone (or if it just makes sense in my head), but let me know if that is confusing and I'll try to do a better job of explaining my idea. I'm also wondering if you could do something involving wire guardians stitched on to the jacket, but I'm not quite sure how it would work.

 

[Bobbie]

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Rachel, I got it and I think your right about making it lace. This way you could to a bunch of different things with it if you wanted to.