It began as you see to the right. From nearly when I began chainmailling, I needed a way of organizing my rings, and found this nuts and bolts organizer, the contents of which were embarrasingly summarily discarded. I then proceeded to carve away the rightmost pockets to fit the pliers as seen through the lid, and hastily labelled the slots for my various stainless steel and titanium rings, and the other slots were more or less filled as necessity dictated.
It eventually became a horrible mess, not so much the rings, but the charms, bits, random ring pile, and other slots, there was little to no organization. And the labels eventually became almost entirely unreadable. It was time for an upgrade. |
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Obtained and labelled in mid 2026, I bought these two cases, that if not the same brand (Stalwart), was certainly inspired by the original (no fathomable what brand it was). So we bought two of the smaller cases (I could also have gotten a larger one literally identical to my original, with black plastic, but then I'd have to carve out the tool slots again).
And so we labelled all of the slots, and this time covered the labels in clear tape to keep them read able, and even separated out the steel, titanium, and aluminium with different pen colours! As well, being in England now, we put both AWG and European metric sizes for each to make purchasing rings easier. Decent. |
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And then... came the reorganization. This was a little bit daunting, I've had this case since I was about 25, and I'm over 45 now, so the dust sitting in those slots is over 20 years old, and the organization of the case showed. In fact, I've generally avoided showing it on camera because of how embarrassed I was of it. But, no more! Organizing it out on the table, I quickly began by sorting all of the scales into the case from scratch, keeping to the middle in figuring I would have the miscellaneous things along the edges, and of course kept the tools in their own slot (though cleaning out the bottom of that was quite satisfying). To preface though, I began by peeling off all of the old labels and cleaning the top and bottom of the lid with acetone, which made it look like new again! Then we added back the tools, added the scales, and added the next most important thing, clasps, into the bottom left. We filled in the top row with necklace chains, the random ring pile (which just moved over a few slots), the uber-thick giant rings, and kept beads, balls, and charms on the top left. We kept earrings along the left, and had three slots left in the second column for just... purely random miscellanea, which I labelled "I" "Dunno" "Lol" :P . The labelling in general was done throughout as I finalized what went where, and as with the ring cases, we went over all of the labels with clear packaging tape to protect from smudging.
And with that... on July 21, 2026, the chainmaille kit was cleaned and reorganized. It looks like new, it feels like new, and I am SO happy to have all of my scales available to me at a glance. There will be the occasional odd colour picked up (like black ice), much like rings (rose niobium), which will go in ye olde overflow bag (hopefully one day I can upgrade the plastic bag, but the contents are fine), which I generally have mental noted, and poke through the bag occasionally as well.
Let the chainmailling continue!!!
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