About this Website
You may have figured out that this is the website of someone named Matthew "Dweezle" Johnston. It started out as "Dweezle's Chainmail Page" sometime around September of 1997 (or was it '96? I can't remember) as one page with pictures, descriptions, and prices for some of the chainmail jewelry I had made. The contents soon became to much for one page so I devided it up into several pages. Other pages were soon added which included some patterns for stuff, a page of links to other sites, and more and more until it turned into a chaotic maze of clot and clutter.

Sometime during all of that, I began using the name NewRenaissance Chainmaille & Jewelry for my business, but during the summer and fall of 2002 I started to think I would rather start using my own name. I'm not sure why that was, just seemed like the thing to do. Just having my name on there seemed a bit odd so I thought about sticking "chainmailler" or "metalsmith" or something like that under it but those do not really describe my work. I decided just to go with "artist", though I do not really like using the word because it does not seem to mean as much as it used to. I also decided to put "vagrant" there because if (or when) I'm not an artist, then I'm prolly away from home either walking and sleeping in ditches and fields; or sea kayaking and sleeping in any out of the way place I can find along the coast. While I was at it with changing the name, I also decided to organize the site a little better and then decided to redesign it a bit. New color schemes, new layout, new name, new stuff. Part of my decission to redesign was because I was starting to do more decorative forge and metal work, and stained glass not made during my normal working hours, so the website was going to get a whole lot more cluttered. I was trying to show something on my site to a friend but could not remember what page it was on.. that was what it took. I couldn't remember where something was on my own website (well, it was close to 100 html files but that's really no excuse). So inJanuary of 2003, I began working on the new version. The new version spent a couple months with the title "Matthew E. Johnston, Artist & Part-time Wandering Vagrant". While selling my work at the Southern Maine Renaissance Faire during the summer of '03, I thought of the name "Twisted Metal & Broken Glass"... which I like because it is a very basic and unglamorous sounding description of what most of my work is... most of my metal work is just beaten up and twisted bits of metal, though very carefully beaten and twisted.. and stained glass is really just a bunch of glass that's been broken into 5,000 & 23 tiny peices and soldered back together to make a picture of some sort... very carefully broken of course, and ground even smaller to get just the right shape.

To give credit to whatever person deserves it, I stole the little javascript picture changing thing (now only on the non-frames version) from the Bangor Explorer's Guild website, and the background color (and I think some text and link colors) from part of The Chainmaille Discussion Board

hmmm, what else... there's a lot here someplace. Tripod gives me 20mb of space and I have about 1mb left. I wish I could take credit for any bad html or other coding that does not work or is a little funky.. no Web design software was used... but Tripod/Lycos hosts this site and they have some sloppy coding going on where they added their advertisements, which I cannot edit, so there's some --> sort of things that mess some pages up a bit. Paintshop Pro was used for all the image editing. An old Epson Photo PC for most of the pictures, random 35mm camera for a few of them, and some of the chainmaille and small metal items were scanned directly off a flatbed scanner. Some of the closeup pics of my metalwork were taken with a friends digital camera, which has a macro mode, but I don't remember what brandname that camera is.