Woven with Joy by StarSpray

woven with joy

The weavers workshops in Tirion are merry places, filled with Treelight spilling through wide open windows, and with laughter drifting over the steady clack of the looms like a melody over a steady beat. Someone begins a song to that beat, and before long nearly everyone else joins in. Along the walls are neat stacks of bolts of cloth in between baskets spilling over with skeins of threads and yarns of all colors and kinds, all bright enough to almost glow in the golden spill of Laurelin’s light.

Vairë comes to sit and weave at times with them, and her Maiar come and go more often, seen and unseen, helping and teaching and learning in turn. Children come to sit at the smaller looms to tangle up their first threads, and learn how to laugh through the mistakes. 

Míriel Therindë is often to be found among them, laughing and sharing in the gossip, for the cloth makers of Tirion weave words nearly as well as they weave their threads. She does not take part in the weaving, for that is not her passion, but she loves to watch the fabric come together out of so many thousands of disparate threads. Her slender fingers run over the bolts of wool and linen and silk as images race through her mind of what she might make with them, what patterns could be embroidered upon the panels of a skirt, or perhaps upon a hanging made to grace the walls of a fine room, what colors would stand out best under the light of Laurelin, and what are better suited to Telperion, or even the Mingling. 

She dreams, too, of one day bringing her children with her to tangle up their own threads in the small teaching looms, and to sit and listen and learn. Of surprising Finwë with their first samplers, or gifting him a clumsily stitched tunic that he’ll wear with pride to the next meeting of his council. The thought makes her smile as she lifts a bolt of linen fabric woven so light that it will feel like wearing air. Perfect for the canopy over a small child’s bed. She will have it dyed blue, perhaps, dark as the skies over Cuiviénen had been, and she will stitch many silver stars into it…