4 in 1 Aventail Pattern Help Please.

[Lucas-Merrick]

I was hoping someone on here had a good pattern for a 4 in 1 rivetted aventail. The last one i tried, I couldn't keep the shape consistant.

Any help would be appreciated.

Lord Lucas of Ironwolf
East Kingdom

[losthelm]

What ring size are you useing?
Do you want the traditional round style or the easier 5 pannel trapezoid?

Do you have the helm your going to attach the avaintail to?
I have done avaintails for both spangen helms and basinets.
The spangen helms usually attach the maille near the brow band.
Basinets usually attach at the helm bottom.
From that point I add a 3" and construct an tube that fits the circumfrance of the helm at the widest point.
Usually around 28-33" depending on the size and bar grill.

From that point you can either build off it or attach pannels.

With pannels I like trapazoids usually 5/circumference in rings.
The pannels end up expanding 2 rings per row.
The trapazoids are then attached to each other using a 45 degree seam.
I then attach the new funnel shape to the top then add a few rows along the bottom.
Trapazoids let me have a few different pieces ready to modify and assemble.
Adding a few rings to the tube and trapazoids lets me custom fit with a much faster turnaround.


For a more circular cone the expansions need to be staggered.
Use a large piece of poster board and draw rays from the center.
put the extra rings on the lines and rotate the cone so the expansion link lays between two lines.

For an oval shape like we see on mantas simply split the circle and add a 3" spacer between the two halves.
This shap also is easy to have staged and tailor by adding a few rings to the spacer.

Konstantin the red, steve S, or Mac will likely have a responce that's easier to understand.
I'm not very good at instructions.
My mind works a lot more along the stream of consciousness and my disgraphia doesn't help.

[Konstantin the Red]

Welcome and well come, Ironwolf104.

Doubtless we can help. First, let's make sure what type of helmet we're wanting to attach to. Next, what did you do, buy the aventail/camail complete, to be trimmed to fit? -- or are you weaving your own? Folks have done both right down to the riveting, DIY.

". . . Couldn't keep the shape consistent." Uh -- we'd need more to work with. Like where you were trying to go -- what shape you were trying to end up with. Right as of this, we haven't any picture at all of what went astray.

Camails on bascinets and mail-drapes on Dark Ages helms and Norman conicals, pretending to be coifs under helmets, have two basic kinds of shapes: they start with a band, rather like a collar but up on your helmet, a few linkrows wide, from which the mail expands either as a flat circle, or as a shallow cone. That is really all there is to it. How you get to either one doesn't matter a great deal to the function of the mail.

Fixed bargrill, or a movable visor of some kind on the helmet? A movable visor demands more cleverness, unless perhaps your helmet has a chinbar inside for the visor to land on. A few do...

The flat circle expansion, like a huge metal doily, wants four expansion links added onto each linkrow, all the way out to the hem, the expansions staggered so they don't line up and make an obvious seam. Other arrays also work for this kind of circular expansion -- different numbers of expansions added in for every second linkrow, e.g., the inner half of the expanse having an expansion linkrow added every 5 links around the perimeter row, then two linkrows cast on, then going round the new perimeter adding an expansion every 5 links, etcetera out to the middle of the radius of the thing, then drop it back to every 7 links around the perimeter row, still casting linkrows on two at a time by weaving links on two at a time. There are many roads to making a camail get bigger around as it goes outward.

The conical recipe is a very simple one: instead of 4 expansion links added per linkrow, add only 3. This array of expansions won't lie flat on a floor, but would lie neatly upon a shallow cone shape. And from just below the level of your ears down and out to your shoulder points, you are -- well, very roughly conical. Camails built this way have less material in them and are somewhat lighter weight overall.

Either of these schemes can be constructed to be a little bit oval rather than perfectly circular. Like a racetrack or a hooked rug. A camail whose linkrows make oval traces accommodates the fact you are wider shoulder to shoulder than you are deep back to front.

If you're snipping a pre-made "turtleneck" camail to suit a helmet, we'll want to know whether it's a bascinet, which has its particular way of going about it, featuring temple triangles to hang the camail properly upon your chin -- or contrariwise some other hat, which as a rule is more free-form. We'd expect you'd be wanting bilateral symmetry?

With either a basc or a conical/spangen-hat, like as not we'd start out not with the mail at first, but with the leather strap attaching the mail to the helmet. Get that configuration and size down, and we get a clear idea what the mail has to do to mesh with it.

If your hat is a bascinet, you may care to Searchbutton onsite on searchterm "camail strap" to bring up a lot of what we've written before.