Finished a couple of bonnets for me and the lovely @bitteryule ! Pleats and lace are something I've found at a local antique fair~ They used to be a taffeta skirt hem from the early 20's century! (which is as beautiful as it is fragile, and they are quite moth eaten haha)
The back and bows of the bonnet are modern english embroidery fabric~
Here's my piece for the LOTR Musical Ephemera Extravaganza! It's a scarf, woven by Arwen and gifted to Frodo before he left on his journey back to the Shire after the destruction of the ring.
Did I buy a loom and teach myself how to weave for this project? Maybe, but I'd say this event gave me more of a... little nudge out of the door, seeing as I'd been wanting to learn ever since my first try at that weaving workshop back in March 🙂↕️
See below the cut for some more details about how I designed the scarf, a short fic, and a video of the weaving in progress:
I wanted to combine the blues of this yarn with the purples of the one on the far left to create something a little like a night sky, so I did a free hand warp that alternated between the colours and then wound both yarns on the shuttle to complete the effect in the weft.
And I went back and forth about how to incorporate the silver starlight, before I finally settled on the last minute almost sashiko style stitching you see at the ends of the scarf in the image above. This was hand stitched once it came off the loom and woven into the tassels to make it even more seamless.
There's a little of my singing in the video below, but I must say that I'm very untrained and my lung capacity isn't the same as it was since before Covid! You can watch the video on mute if you don't want to hear it.
The days that followed the crowning of the king were long and warm. Yet Frodo felt a chill as he watched his cousins playfully arguing over the packing of their ponies for the journey home.
He still couldn't reckon with how much they had changed. He remembered a time when Pippin would look up at him all starry eyed whenever they went tramping about the Shire together, but now he could barely keep up with her.
Frodo thought that it must have been all the time he spent apart from his cousins and the rest of the fellowship that made him feel at such a loss. He had been so single minded in his quest and in the notion that he wouldn't make it back, he never considered what would happen if he did.
Yet there was still no accounting for the chill in his bones or the melancholy he felt as he realised just how much his cousins had grown in his absence.
When he heard the king calling his name, he looked over to see him approach with the queen on his arm, and almost forgot to bow.
"Please, Frodo," he murmured, as he reached out and lifted him up by the arm. "You know there's no need for that between us."
With a little smile tugging at the corner of his lips, Frodo replied, "If only I had known when we first met. I might not have been so rude to you."
Strider laughed. "We are a long way from Bree. And I was not a pleasing sight in those days."
Yet now, he and his lady were resplendent in the morning sun. The light was captured in the silver white of the king's crown and the woven fabric that was draped over the queen's arm.
When she saw Frodo looking at it, Arwen stepped forward and offered the weave to him. "I hope that this gift may bring you comfort when the memory of fear and darkness troubles you."
Once it was in his hands, he saw that it was a scarf of startling beauty, made in the colours of an early evening sky. Pale blue with hints of purple the same shade as the queen's dress. And shot through the ends of the scarf, like starlight dancing across the dark waters of the Great River Anduin when it seemed as though all hope was failing, were long and delicate threads of silver.
Frodo had a faint memory of waking in Rivendell all those months ago to Arwen weaving in his room. He could see the shape of her through the canopy of his bed, singing gently to the rhythmic sound of her work as she brought a tapestry to life with practised ease.
He was laying under a blanket that she made when word came of his imminent arrival. Ever curious as the nephew of a storyteller ought to be, Frodo asked her about it, and she explained that her kin had been weaving from the fibres of the wood since they set foot upon these lands.
He had carried a phial of the light of Eärendil’s star all the way from the lady of Lothlórien's hand to the very depths of Mordor. Yet he somehow he felt that the scarf was too fine a gift for him to accept.
When he said as much out loud, Arwen shook her head. "It is only small in light of all that you have done. May it keep you warm on the journey home and every journey thereafter."
He looked down at the scarf and felt the fabric between his fingers. It was soft as the sound of her voice and softer still when Strider reached out and gently wrapped it around Frodo's neck. "Our lives are woven together, yours and mine," he murmured. "You will be honoured in these lands until the end of days."
