Fiber Monday - fairy tales

All I've done this week, besides sweat, is to start threading the loom for the fabric I'm weaving. This is what the loom will look like for a while. 
The back beam folds down so I can sit right in front of the heddles to thread them. 

Some of the heddles all threaded:


Here is the whole warp. You can see the hundred or so ends that are all threaded on the left and all the ones still left to go. 


If the weather cooperates, I should be able to have it threaded by the weekend. 

But that's not terribly interesting, so I really wanted to talk about the prevalence of fiber work in fairy tales. It's really very prevalent... the spinning wheels in Sleeping Beauty and Rumpelstiltskin for example . But I was listening to a podcast this morning while I did the barn about various origins of fiber words. (It was actually more interesting than that description makes it sound.) When they were discussing geographical origins of various words, the name 'gauze' as a fabric name came up. It was evidently a very fine fabric spun in the city of Gaza during the middle ages and was imported to Europe with the returning crusaders. (We'll just set aside all the myriad instances of horror that previous sentence raises, shall we?) The gusset was so fine that it was said a person could wear seven layers of it and it could still be seen through. 

This was probably a bit of hyperbole, but it does give the sense of the fabric's sheerness. I don't know about you, but after I heard that, the story of The Emperor's New Clothes made a little more sense. Am I the only one to find it more than a little implausible that the weavers could be weaving nothing and get away with it? But what if there was a fabric that was so sheer it had a barely there appearance? And what if that fabric was both known and valued? We all know that it is human nature to take things to extremes, so making something more sheer... almost invisible even... could then be seen as at least possible, if not probable. I find this all vaguely satisfying, as if I solved a mystery I didn't know I was bothered by. 

But you won't see me weaving such a fabric. I can only imagine how many thousands of ends would need to be threaded to create such a thing. 

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