Solo Lacemakers Thread

[Aramenta]

Nula Sweetwind would smile at a rot-bodied Nuit, if given the chance. A seamstress by trade, Nula's greatest talent, Ara had found, had less to do with the quality of her sewing, and more to do with the quality of her connections, and her ingratiating skill in making more of them. In spite of all this, in spite of her brain knowing better, Ara always felt that Nula saved a special smile particularly for her.

"Aramenta Stonewhistling! I felt the tug of you on my web this morning, and WONDERED when you'd be dropping by!" The accompanying smile was broad, spread from the expansive movement of her shoulders to her mouth, to her high, plump cheeks, to her twinkling eyes. It practically curled outward into broad expanse of her brown-blonde braids.

She was right of course - Ara had been nosing about that morning. She was low on piece work, and spring was well advanced now. She needed something to do, some way to build up her dowry chest, she figured, now that she was coming of age. She blushed and half bowed, brushing the dust off her own work-trousers, noting the spotless white of Nula's skirts. Most of the women Ara knew well wore a skirt only the time of their cycle. Nula sewed hers to be worn easily, even when she rode, just over the knees in front with a long train in the back. Ara, with the vague understanding of fashion she had, had seen these elsewhere scattered about the city, and wondered if they were growing popular.

Nula smiled, "Looking for work to be doing, eh, Ara? Spring is hard these days! Wintertime," she frowned as she said the words, "There was work, but all shrouds and funeral bands. If no taste for that sort of thing."

Ara disagreed with her. Funereal clothes had a certain severe beauty to them, and the spinning and weaving and dying was always a powerful process to Ara, as if she were, for a moment, connected to the suffering families. Not that she was glad for all the death of the preceding winter. Noone was. She did not press the point, only signed polite assent, and query.

Nula's signing under her voice was fluid and complex, filled with little hints and suggestions, the edges of emotions. Ara had met an Eypharian once, and Nula reminded her of the experience, for her hands communicated so much, it was hard to think she had only two of them. Now they waved through, very subtly, a thread of amusement, of happiness, of coquettish glee, of condescension, all just light enough in her gestures to be taken if desired, to be ignored if not, by the listener, "I figure, spring coming on, and so many men gone, this season will be different. Weddings, I hope. Maybe by winter some buntings, eh?" She laughed at her own joke.

Ara stood at an intimate distance now. Livvy stood beside her, quiet and impassive. Ara had long had the feeling Livvy was none too fond of Nula. Nula, for her part clearly barely noticed the slave girl existed. Nula was kind, but she was also practical - she wanted to make friends she could be of benefit, and where the friend could benefit her in return. A sullen faced slave girl with no terribly noticeable skills? Did not fill these requirements. Ara leaned to whisper in her slave's ear, "Maybe she'd like to get some linen woven ahead?"

Livvy nodded, and signed respect and slight entreaty underneath her words, "Missy Ara say maybe you got some linen work you need done?"

Nula did not look at the slave girl when she spoke - she was used to this method of communication, and thought of the misdirection through Livvy as simply an extension of Ara's mouth, so out of kind politeness to Ara, she kept her eyes trained on the mistress rather than the slave, as she would had the conversation not had this misdirection.

"'smatter o' fact, not linen… but I'm short on lacemaker's thread."

Ara raised an eyebrow at this. Lacemaker's thread was fine work, not something she'd normally even afford the materials for, as it had to be made of high quality cottons, and was usually bleached white besides.

"I've never made it before, Livvy," she whispered.

Livvy nodded, "She say, she ain' made nothin' so fine 'fore."

Nula waved a hand, "If you ever wanted to learn? I tell you I think this will be the year. Nothing says wedding like a touch of lace on the binding ribbon, or along the edges of a trousseau. You buy the cotton, just a small bale, bring me your first spool. Let me see it, and I'll tell you if I can use it. If I can't, I'll buy the cotton off you, and just sell it to whoever I can get to do the work. Deal?"

Livvy answered before Ara even whispered, "How much you gwinn need, Missy Nula?"

Nula laughed, "As far as I'm concerned, I reckon I'll tell you when you can stop." Her hands fluttered a shrewd wink, and gracious appreciation, and bemusement, all at once.x

[Aramenta]

Livvy came home that evening, with a small bale of white, bound up carefully in old muslins, on her shoulder. This wasn't like wool, that they bought in loads that were hauled about on the mule's back. Fine cotton, especially in spring far from the Eypharian trade routes, was a precious good.

"Missy Ara, you wan' check this?"

Ara bounded up, and helped pull the bale down from Livvy's back, unwrapping a corner of it. She pulled a bit of it out rubbed it between her fingers, and smiled - it squeaked as she rubbed it, the tiny, waxy fibers smooth and fine beneath her fingertips. She smiled broadly and kissed Livvy on the forehead, "Perfect! Where did you find it?"

"Browngrass. He has 15 bales of the stuff, and unloaded it on me for cheap. Been a rough winter for him, for selling imports."

Ara nodded, with a slight frown. Livvy had a way of sniffing out a good deal of things, a feat for her even as an agent of her mistress, being an outsider. The skill made Ara squirm a little bit - they were getting this cotton cheap because the Browngrass were in dire straits. She made a mental note, if she made anything off the sale, to send a nice gift to the Browngrass, something practical to show her gratitude.

They drew out a great basket then, the two of them, and Livvy set to work, picking the bolls apart, and tearing the seeds out with the practiced absentees of experience. She had tough fingertips, and strong hands, and sharp little eyes. Ara knelt beside her, and started picking at the cotton, as well - slower, both because she was not as experienced, and because she had to keep her fingers sensitive for the weaving. Livvy settled in with a pleasant smile, and sang while they pulled seeds, nothing serious, some bit of nonsense, Ara suspected, that she was just making up as she went along.

"Cotton in the basket, lookin' at me,
Gotta put m' baby up in the hickory tree.
Gotta put m' baby up in the hickory tree,
Or she gonna wander off in the great grass sea.

Missy say, careful, gonna cut yo' fingers,
Cause the cotton, she's a bee who got a thousand stingers
Cotton, she's a bee who got a thousand stingers:
I don't wanna pull cotton, Lawd, I wanna be a singer.

Missy, lay down, in a chicken feather-bed,
She told me I was featherbrained, but I wasn't, I said,
When she told me I was featherbrained, this is what I said,
I said, 'The cotton bolls a-climbed into the brains in my head.'

Gone spin my cotton, make some fine woolen pants,
Gone spin it into silken satin gloves for my hands,
Spinnin' cotton into silk, to sew gloves for your hands,
Then my trousers gone stand me up and teach me how to dance!"

Ara laughed her queer little pantomimes of glee at this, and dropped her cotton to pull up to her feet, and dance. Now, no one had, per se, ever TAUGHT Ara how to dance. But she'd watched dancing before - she'd been to her share of funerals and festivals, after all. And she started stomping her feet in time to the song, and whirling about, clapping hands on the offbeats of the tune. Livvy laughed and clapped her own hands, ripping a grito out of her throat mixed with a deep belly laugh. Ara made her shoulders and neck stiff then, hands on her hips, the way they'd once seen a Svefra girl dancing, a jigging little hornpipe - this was even more an approximation, and if a Svefra had actually seen the dance, they would likely have rolled their eyes. But, she kept rhythm at least, stomping her feet in a good, square quarter beat, in between her playful attempts at a muddy replication of the complex tapping footwork of the hornpipes.

"Old cotton mama, gone take me to the river,
Gone take me a whiskey-sour, but I don't know the giver,
Gone take a whiskey-sour, never worry 'bout the giver,
Gone drink it down straight, like a punch in the liver."

Then Livvy, laughing hard, stumbled up to her own feet, caught the whiff of the step Ara was half-making up, dancing beside her. Ara wore a morning dress, still dusty from the market, and she picked the skirts up to the knee, to show her own feet, hooting and stomping in time with Ara. They stumbled back and forth, then hooked arms, doing silly circumnavigations around the center point of the tent in time with each other, Ara mouthed words, even though they were utterly inaudible, her busy hands giving only the barest translation.

"Cotton needs pullin', a yankin' and a thinnin',
Cotton needs cardin', a drawn', and a spinnin,
Cotton needs a spindle and a good strong spinnin',
Baby need a bunting made o' cotton soft linen."

"Watch this now!" Livvy shouted, and Ara stopped dancing, clapping out the beats. Livvy, meanwhile, set her spine ramrod straight, with a severe, stiff-muscled face, and stamped hard on the ground in a pitter of syncopated eighths and a single triplet. The whole pattern was eight measures long, Livvy's thin calves sweaty and unshaven, and a bit clumsy. She stomped hard at the end, and started clapping. Ara immediately set her back stiff and her face severe, caricature of Livvy's caricature, that made her look like a child playing at angry-faces. Then she set into passably good imitation of the pattern Livvy had made.

Livvy whooped, and clapped, and laughed, and Ara made her spine more fluid doing a series of more flowing drags and kicks in time with the clapping, then. Livvy laughed, pulled the skirt up to mid thigh, throwing her head back in a gesture that was a humorous imitation of sexy, and stumbled through the pattern. They went back like this for a good ten minutes, both of them getting sweatier and clumsier as they went, short of breath both from the exertion and from the laughter that shook their bellies. Finally Ara's throat caught on the heavy breathing and she started coughing, and sat down, still laughing with a finger up. Livvy came behind her and patted her back in a laugh.

"Lawks, they gone string me up, for murderin' my missy!"

This just made the laugh mix into Ara's cough, and it took a few minutes for her lungs to calm down sufficiently to let her catch her breath, and they both, now red-faced and sweaty, wiped off their hands and went back to picking cotton. Livvy whistled tunelessly the whole time, though occasionally swerving for just a bar or two into the Cotton Song she'd made up, looking slyly at Ara when she did, who would promptly start pulling at the cotton in time with the beat of the song for a moment, perhaps clapping once as she threw the picked boll into the basket, before returning to the work.
x

[Aramenta]

The work took the better part of the morning, but eventually there was enough of a pile of picked fiber for Ara to start winding it about the distaff. The cotton fibers were so fine and tangled, this took some care, to pull them into a moderately regular grain, without tearing the continuum of fiber and making hell for herself later in the spinning process. Livvy kept picking at the bale, her sturdy, competent hands picking tiredly but with the aching determination of one who knows how to work at a task. Ara finished winding, and looked down at her distaff, pale and snowy as Winter in the north of the Grass-sea. Then, with the mixture of confidence and caution necessary to keep the thread moving without rushing herself, she whirled the fiber round and round her finger, ran it over her left hand, and set the spindle at the end of it, winding the delicate fiber on the anchoring hook a few extra times just to be sure it would not tear. Then, she closed her eyes.

Spinning was still, in Ara's mind, an almost sacred task. She closed her eyes, and gently probed out into the web around her, touching the threads of the pavilion, to test their harmonics. This had started as something between a game and a superstation for her, the feeling that she needed to tune herself to the flowing energy of the spinning-seat in order to begin singing the whirring song of the spindle - the Little Wooden Mistress, she still called it in her mind with the pleasant internal laugh one has for the harmless fantasies of childhood that, perhaps, one has not entirely ceased to believe in. The tent still hummed softly with the last vibrations of Livvy and Ara's dancing, just the slightest warp and vibration of the cords - a good weave, a virtuous weave, was always a bit stronger for being tangled into laughter, and Ara smiled to feel the last echoes of the song in it. She reopened her eyes, then, and set her fingers to the spindle. Livvy, from her nest of half pulled cotton watched, the timbre of her quiet work-song-humming changing from the energetic beating of the cotton-picking, to a low, oscillating, almost lullaby-like sound. Ara heard the gentle consideration of this gesture, and smiled, as she always smiled. Livvy knew how the spinning worked for Ara. She knew that it was the time to change from a March to a Hymn, and though she would perhaps never know the faith of the Wooden Mistress, she had learned the timbre of her sacred music, a chorister to her own mistress, the priestess in training.

And with a gentle twirl of her fingers, Ara set the spindle whirling, watching carefully to make sure the first threads set properly and began to climb the spool in regular, clean rows. She stopped it once, sensing a little rattle in the spin, and felt the shaft of the spool - a little irregularity bulged in the oily residue of a thousand spools of wool, cotton, flax, hemp, and Ara scratched it gently with her thumbnail, smoothing it then with a darting lick of her small pink tongue, and the friction of the heel of her thumb. She stroked the rod delicately then - smooth now. And she set it whirling again, closing her eyes to concentrate on the feel of the the trembling new born length of thread - better, smoother, much smoother. The threads climbed to the very shaft, and Ara turned the guide hand subtly, sending the thread climbing back down. Up. Down. Up. Down. The whirring breath of the spindle tickled gently at the warn fabric of Ara's linen work-shirt. Ara closed her eyes and concentrated on feeling everything at once - the gently endless tug of the spindle, the imperceptible waxy squeak of cotton smoother between forefinger and thumb, the breath of the spindle, the frayed threads on the corner of the elbow patches of her shirt, wavering in a way, just perceptible as a vibration to the insensitive skin of her elbows underneath the sleeve.

She breathed deep, and listened, falling almost subconsciously half into the web as she spun, and her face relaxed, slack and peaceful, hearing the gentle interplay of the fading threads of the Cotton Song, of Livvy's gentle humming, of the whir of the spindle, the squeak of the cotton, and the gentle, slowing patter of her own heart in the center of it all.

There was something to spinning that made one feel pregnant with creative power, and moments like this she felt almost like Semele herself, Semele whose thousand thousand hands slowly, slowly spun stone from the susurrations of the soft respirations of the earth.
x

[Aramenta]

By the end of the week, they had a small heap of the proto-thread - Ara knew it was only the start of the work, for lacemaker's thread was not simple stuff to produce. The two of them scoured their hands then, and took chalk-lime, crushing it down fine, and grinding it into the threads by hand - they'd kept the skeins small for this very reason, for if the mica could not grind into the centers of the bundles, then the whitening would be irregular, and the thread would be fit only for cheap-work. Whitening was for trickier work, Ara had learned than simple dying, for the chalk-lime, left to short would leave the fabric sallow and irregular, but left too long, it made the thread brittle and rough. They put the thread, then, in a pot of water, with a few vinegared apples bobbing at the surface, and left it. Ara was not a master of this process, by a far cry, and she spent a great deal of time checking, double-checking, the thread-ends to see if they were ready yet.

IT took all day, in the end, and one of the skeins simply didn't take at all, for reasons that Ara was too inexperienced to really understand. She threw this one in her scraps - the thread had luckily not roughened, and even misdyed cotton was not a valueless product. It would make a fine warm-weather swaddling when she found time to weave it.

Now, the thread had to be spun twice more. The first time, was simple to let her fingers smooth out and places where the rough chalk-grit might have accrued in the proto-thread. This was tedious, but important work, for lace-thread had to be eminently soft and regular. She had, luckily learned the trick of softening the thread as it spun, her distaff hand fingers running a fingernail to just barely fray the outer fibers of the thread, and set a gently nap to it.

Then, came the last spinning, for lacemaker's thread was cabled rather than simply threaded. She took two skeins of the spun, dyed, cleaned and softened threads and tied them to the anchor hook, and set it spinning. This last step, to Ara was the easiest, a simply manner of letting the already world-wise thread wrap gently around each other, the softened nap giving plenty of tooth for the the two threads to bind to each other. She kept a thin smear of beeswax on her guide fingers, to but a mild finish on the cabling, and this was the most difficult part, really - with wool, you did not have to do this at all, hardly, given the sheerer volume of oil and lanolin in the cloth, and in the coarser thread she made for canvas duck, you twilled so much wax into it that you could spit on the skeins without leaving a wet spot. Here, a little wax was necessary, but just enough to give the thread some bite, without taking away the nap of it.

But the work was done, finally, and she ended up with a good armful of skeins, just before it was time to leave with the webbing repair team, on duty along the southern border. Ara had pulled already another bundle of cotton for her, and packed it in large, almost weightless bags to be spun down on her long journey, with whatever spare time the web-work left her.

All the remained was Nula, and so Ara walked to her pavilion, now, a soft basket under her arm heavy with dense skeins of cotton. Nula greeted her at the door, her mouth full of long, shining pins, carefully kept in place by her tight lips, that curled around the valuable steel pins now in a smile just for Ara.

"Back wiff my wacemakers thedd?"

Ara looked at her queerly, having trouble deciphering pin-in-the-mouth-tongue. Nula laughed - through her nose, though, and waved a hand, "Come in! I'm figging s… never mine. Come in!"

Ara did. In the middle of the room was a watchman, with the drapings of a woolen-coat over his shoulders, shining with pins here and there, looking decidedly uncomfortable, standing stock still on a barrel. Nul knelt to straighten the hemline of the skirting of the coat, using the last of the pins.

"Ara, sorry about that…" she paused viewing the line, to see if it was straight then continued, "You have my lacemaker's thread?"

Ara nodded, and brought a skein to the seamstress, she unwound a length of it, rubbed it against the sensitive skin of her cheek, held it up to the light to check the color, rubbed it in her fingers to check the texture. Then nodded, "That will do, Sister Stonewhistling, indeed! You have more cotton, eh?"

Ara smiled, proudly, a weight off her chest.

"How much? How many bales you got?"

Ara signed: 15.

Nula raised an eyebrow and laughed, "15? You've got a whole season ahead of you with that much! And with you going out on the webbing team, too, right? WEll, have at it. I'll take whatever you spin, if you keep it as nice as this lot."x

[Limey]

Skill and Lore Rewards Skills Lore Observation 2 Nula Sweetwind: A People Person Weving 3 A Fresh Deal, A New Challenge Dancing 1 A Slave Mouthpiece Dyeing 1 Working By Hand, Not Eye Whitening With Lime Additional Notes : Great work as usual, love, but I have a few pointers and questions. Firstly, you may want to rethink your text color and background, because white on pale makes it very hard to read. Secondly, and this is more a subjective point, but the dialect you have Livvy speaking in is very, very similar to the stereotypical Nego slave-woman accent. If that's what you're aiming for, fine, but it's pretty cliche. You may want to rethink it for something a little more original. Thirdly, either include it in the thread or make an OOC note, but specify exactly how much you want for your wares and what quantities you are buying/selling. I'm looking through the price list and to be frank, I'm kinda lost, too. Be much easier if you specified and, of course, they don't have Lace included there, ha! Just get back to me when you can. Aside from that, excellent and absorbing work. I especially loved the song and dance, did you make them up yourself? If so... wow. Very impressive. Any questions or queries, please PM me.