The normal length of a peplos, and probably most clothing woven on the warp-weighted loom was about 4 to 5 feet wide and 5 to seven feet long. Cloth of that length could not be made without rolling it up as it was being woven and, indeed, in most of the loom images, it is clear that a length of already woven cloth is wound on the top beam of the loom, the ‘cloth beam’. The ruse that Penelope used to delay answering her suitors—weaving by day and unweaving by night so that the finishing of the work would be indefinitely delayed—is much more plausible if one knows that the cloth was wound up as it was woven and thus could never be visible on the loom in its entirety. It would be almost impossible to unroll it until the whole cloth was completed and ready to be removed from the loom.
In a well-illustrated discussion of what kind of weaving Penelope might have been doing, Barber shows that first, in order for her ruse to be credible, the funeral shroud Penelope was weaving for Laertes must have been patterned. Pattern weaving is time consuming. Second, the weave structure for such a ceremonial cloth was probably either tapestry or supplementary weft. Third, pictorial cloth was typically arranged in horizontal bands of figures or friezes. Fourth, from comparative evidence, it is entirely credible that culturally important narratives would be recorded in a ceremonial cloth, as Helen in Iliad III 125–128 is said to weave the story of the Trojan War. And fifth, the weaving of such an icon is a quasi-priestly office and would, in Homeric times, necessarily be in the hands of an elite woman rather than a band of slaves.