Awesome Chainmaille

This unique dress is worth far more than the sum of the 2652 pennies it’s made from. Textile artist Crescent Shay spent nearly a month collecting pennies and fabricating the copper and zinc dress by drilling holes in 1-cent coins and stitching them together like scalemail armor.

Making the woven metal armor known as chainmail (or “chainmaille”) is a time-consuming, laborious process. So imagine what it must be like to create a suit of chainmail armor for a giant. Blacksmith Timothy Dyck painstakingly forged 250 circles then riveted them together to make a scaled-up version fit for Paul Bunyan.

Chainmaille, or colloquially “Chain Mail,” is that sweet looking flexible armor that dates back to the 3rd century BC. The real stuff is notoriously heavy and hard to construct. Tested’s Adam Savage and Ben Eadie show off a creative new way to make the stuff for costumes using laser-cut EVA foam.