This looks fairly complex, but it’s a rather simple weave (6th Gen.) made alongside Flat TabMail as a combo of the 2 TabScale variants. This is incredibly flexible to the point of being too flexible, and unless lined around the edges with another weave folds in on itself too easily (meaning tabs will flip and get caught). This uses 16 ga 1/4 AR 4.2 Bright Aluminum Rings I purchase mine from TheRingLord, but as long as they are 1/4 and 14-18 ga any ring should work fine. I chose Bright Aluminum to match properly with the aluminum can tabs.
- Difficulty: 3/5 – While it’s familiar to TabScale and it’s Reverse don’t try and complete this by changing up every row as you will certainly screw up, instead the band method seems to be fairly easy to grasp.
- Flexibility: 5/5 – It bends any way you want it. Any way.
- Tabs per sq. ft: ~375
- Rings per sq. ft: ~600
1. Lay the tabs out as you would for TabScale Reverse
2. And connect. Note: this weave is very unwieldy as it’s narrow even this 4 wide was a pain.
3. Make a few of these bands.
4. Our goal is to connect them as show below.
5. To do this flip it over and place a ring through the middle bar of the lower tab on a band.
6. Then connect and upper tab’s top part.
7. Go to the next tab and add a ring to the middle.
8. And connect the same tab from step 6.
9. When you repeat step 5 make sure it’s in the same tab (should be 2 rings going through the middle bar except for edges), and continue on down the band.
10. This is what it should look like flipped over.
11. Finally connect some more bands to lengthen it.
12. Now connecting swatches is a pain, make sure that your lower and higher layers are right and that if you have 1 side with the tab half out, make sure the other side is half a tab in. (You can connect them without matching up like a zipper, but you will have to add/remove tabs)