WeaveWater - endlessm/threadbare GitHub Wiki

"Half of Threadbare is wearing WeaveWater, and most of it doesn't know." -- A WeaveWater saying

WeaveWater is a small, busy river town of weavers and dyers, a few days' walk from Frays End, and the town that weaves cloth for all of Threadbare. For as long as anyone can remember, its looms have clattered from dawn to dusk along the banks of the Long Warp, and its finished bolts have travelled downriver to Frays End and beyond. It is also home to the Summoning Square, where the Sacred Sewing Machine rests, and where every StoryWeaver in history has been made.

WeaveWater weaves for everyone. And when the world needs a hero, it sews one too.

At a Glance


Known as	The Town That Weaves for Everyone
Type	Settlement
Location	On the Long Warp, downriver of LinenVille, a few days' walk from Frays End
Residents	Weavers, dyers, bargefolk and their families
Notable residents	Wist WishWeaver, Tess TreadleFoot, Maddie MadderMoss, Mabel MillRace, Ossie OverShot, Tibb TwillTwist
Trades in	Woven and dyed cloth of every kind, sold in market towns across Threadbare
Core Thread	Spirit
Famous for	Its water mills and the finest weaves in Threadbare, the Summoning Square, and the Sacred Sewing Machine
Status	Thriving
Themes	Community, Craft, Giving, Calling for Help

The Town

The Long Warp

The river runs dead straight through the middle of WeaveWater, like a warp thread pulled taut across a loom, and the Threadlings call it the Long Warp. The town's looms are built along both banks and worked by waterwheels, so that the river itself does half the weaving.

The Water Mills

Long ago, the weavers of WeaveWater noticed that the Long Warp never stopped moving, and wondered why their looms should. So they built waterwheels along its banks, and set the river to work.

Today a whole street of mills lines each bank, each with its great wheel turning in the current. The wheels drive long wooden shafts that run beneath the floors of the weaving sheds, and from the shafts run leather belts to every loom in the building, so that a single wheel can drive a hundred looms at once. A weaver need only guide the threads. The river does the rest.

The mills are the pride of the town, and every one of them has a name and a character. The oldest is the Great Wheel, which has turned without stopping since before anyone can remember and creaks in a low, steady voice that WeaveWater children say is the river talking. Upstream, where the water falls fastest, stand the Overshot Mills, whose wheels are fed from above by wooden channels and spin so quickly that their looms must be watched every moment. Downstream, the broad Undershot Mills turn slowly and patiently in the deep water, and weave the heaviest cloth. Between them all runs the Mill Race, a stone channel that carries the river from wheel to wheel, so that the same water turns every mill in town before it leaves.

Because the river does the heavy work, WeaveWater's weavers have time for care, and care is what made their cloth famous. A WeaveWater weave is tighter, truer and more even than any woven by hand alone, and it holds its pattern for generations.

The Weaves of WeaveWater

Each season the Long Warp runs at a different pace, and each pace makes a different cloth. The weavers of WeaveWater learned long ago to weave with the river, not against it, and the most famous weaves in all of Threadbare were born of this.

RiverTwill - The everyday cloth of WeaveWater, woven all year round on the Undershot Mills. Hard-wearing, diagonal-ribbed and nearly impossible to tear, it is the cloth of every travelling coat, sailor's jacket and wagon cover in Threadbare. They say a RiverTwill coat will outlast three owners and remember all of them.
WheelCheck - A bright check pattern whose squares are counted out by the turns of the waterwheel, so every mill weaves its own check. A Threadling who knows their mills can tell from a tablecloth which wheel in WeaveWater turned it.
RippleWeave - A light, shimmering cloth woven only on the Overshot Mills, where the water runs fastest. Held up to the light it seems to move like water, and on a breezy day a RippleWeave scarf looks as though it is still flowing downriver.
SlackWater Lawn - The finest, sheerest cloth in Threadbare, woven only in high summer, when the river runs low and slow and the wheels turn gently enough for the most delicate thread. It is so light that a whole bolt can be folded into a walnut shell. LinenVille has been trying to match it for three hundred years.
HighWater Brocade - The rarest and most treasured of all. It can only be woven during the spring floods, for a few days each year, when the Long Warp roars and the Great Wheel turns faster than at any other time. Its patterns are rich, raised and full of colour, and it is woven only for celebrations: wedding cloths, festival banners and the canopies of the Performance Playa. To own a scrap of HighWater Brocade is to own a little of WeaveWater's spring.

"Weave with the river, never against it. The river was here first." -- The first rule of the WeaveWater mills

The Dye Vats

No WeaveWater cloth leaves the town undyed. Before it reaches the world's market towns, every bolt passes through the hands of the Dyers, and the Dyers work on the walls.

The old town walls of WeaveWater are lined, inside and out, with great dye vats of copper, stone and seasoned oak, set into the stonework in long rows like the pots on a giant's stove. Each vat holds a single colour, and each colour has its place on the wall, so that walking the full circuit of the walls takes you through every colour in Threadbare, in order. Visitors are told to start at Madder Gate, where the reds begin, and to finish at the Indigo Steps, where the blues grow so deep they are nearly night.

The Dyers are a family trade as old as the mills. They mix their colours from plants, roots, berries, barks and minerals gathered from across Threadbare, and from the inks of the InkKeepers, set fast with MordantMaples bark, so that a WeaveWater colour never fades or runs. Their greatest skill is pattern. By binding, folding, waxing and stitching the cloth before it goes into the vat, and by dipping it again and again in different colours, the Dyers can draw patterns into the cloth itself: river ripples, falling leaves, starbursts, and house patterns that seem to shimmer from one colour into the next. Some of their patterns take a whole season and a hundred dips to finish, and are passed from Dyer to apprentice by word of mouth alone, never written down.

The rinse water runs off the walls in little stone channels and down into the Long Warp, so that for a stretch below the town the river runs in ribbons of colour. Threadlings call it the Rainbow Reach, and say you can tell what the Dyers are working on that week just by looking at the water.

Only once a bolt has been dyed, rinsed and dried on the Drying Lines is it ready for First Fold, and for the market towns beyond.

"The weavers give it strength. The river gives it patience. We give it something to say." -- Maddie MadderMoss - Master Dyer of the Walls

The Loom Bridges

WeaveWater's bridges are not ordinary bridges. Each one is an enormous loom, and cloth is woven across the river as you walk over it. No bridge looks the same two days running, and children race to be the first across in the morning to see what pattern the night has left behind.

The Drying Lines

Endless lengths of freshly dyed cloth hang on lines strung between the rooftops to dry, in every colour that came off the walls that morning. From the hills above, WeaveWater looks like a town dressed in bunting for a party that never ends.

The drying lines are the RagPies' favourite larder. A mischief of them nests on top of every mill wheel, and no weaver ever hangs out a bolt without counting it twice, once when it goes up and once when it comes down.

The Clack

You hear WeaveWater long before you see it. From dawn to dusk the looms clatter, and the Threadlings say the town has a heartbeat. When one loom falls quiet, the neighbours knock on the weaver's door to check that all is well.

The Weavers of WeaveWater

House Patterns

Every WeaveWater family weaves its own pattern, a signature in cloth passed down from one generation to the next. Patchlings learn to weave their own name into their family pattern before they can write it. A WeaveWater blanket in any home in Threadbare will tell you exactly which family made it, if you know how to read it.

First Fold

Once a season, the finished, dyed cloth of WeaveWater is rolled into bolts, loaded onto barges and sent down the Long Warp to Frays End and beyond. The whole town turns out on the banks to wave it off, and there is singing, and there are far too many pies. Most of the cloth in Threadbare began its life as a WeaveWater bolt.

Neighbours and Trade

WeaveWater weaves, and LinenVille spins and bleaches, and the two towns have bickered fondly for centuries over whose work matters more. Flax comes upriver from LinenVille's FoldFlax fields, and wool from the BobbleBleats grazing the hills above the town. Dyes come from the InkKeepers of The Ink Well, whose MordantMaples bark makes WeaveWater's colours hold fast. SpindleHops nest in the soft heaps of offcuts behind the weaving sheds, and nobody has the heart to move them.

The Summoning Square

At the heart of WeaveWater lies a wide, cobbled square ringed by weaving sheds: the Summoning Square. Lines strung between the rooftops carry every Calling Cloth ever sewn, the oldest so faded that their stitches can barely be seen. In the middle of the square, beneath a canopy quilted from offcuts of every house pattern in town, rests the Sacred Sewing Machine.

The Sacred Sewing Machine

The Sacred Sewing Machine was made by Threadlings. Not by the FirstSpun ([If]], [[Once]] and [[Ever]]), and not by [[The Elders]], but by ordinary Threadlings, in the frightened early days of the world, after Knot abandoned the [Eternal Loom and the Elders were still few. Tired of waiting to be saved, a gathering of Threadlings from every early community came together in WeaveWater and built it themselves. Each brought one part: spinners brought the spool, weavers brought the treadle, smiths brought the needle, and storytellers brought the first thread. Nobody's name is on it, and WeaveWater is quietly proud of that.

The Elders call it sacred because it was the first thing in Threadbare to surprise them. Nothing the FirstSpun had made had ever made something of its own.

A loom makes new cloth from thread. A sewing machine joins together pieces that already exist. Every other being in Threadbare was woven. A StoryWeaver is sewn, pieced together from the world as it already is.

"The FirstSpun made the world. The Elders keep it. Threadlings made the StoryWeaver." -- Saying of the Summoning Square

The Calling

A StoryWeaver cannot be called by one Threadling alone, however great their need. Not a king, not a sorcerer, not an Elder. The Sacred Sewing Machine wakes only when a whole community calls together.

In a time of great need, a community hangs a Calling Cloth in its square, or wherever its people gather.
Every Threadling sews a single stitch into it, and pins on a scrap of something they could not finish: half a sock, an unsent letter, a song with no last verse.
Every Calling Cloth finds its way to WeaveWater, by barge, by caravan, or in a Patchling's satchel, and is hung in the Summoning Square.
When enough stitches have been sewn, by enough different hands, the KnitWitch of WeaveWater begins the long ritual on the Sacred Sewing Machine, and keeps watch through the night as it sews a StoryWeaver from the scraps on the cloth.

A StoryWeaver wakes carrying a little of everyone who called for them. This is why no two StoryWeavers are ever alike, and why every one of them feels, without quite knowing why, that they owe something to people they have never met.

So every StoryWeaver in history was made in WeaveWater, and not one of them has ever stayed. They are sewn in the Summoning Square and sent out to wherever they were called from, and the town waves them off from the banks of the Long Warp, as it waves off the cloth on First Fold. WeaveWater makes heroes for everyone else, and says goodbye at the door.

Summons for a StoryWeaver

News reaches WeaveWater before almost anywhere else. Every barge that comes back up the Long Warp brings word from the market towns, and for a long while the word had been worrying: Void Creep on the walls of the border towns, grey edges on cloth sent home for mending, and orders from the Fraying that simply stopped arriving. Then the Calling Cloths began to come, by barge, by caravan and in Patchlings' satchels, from towns all across Threadbare, more of them in a single season than Mabel MillRace had seen in her whole life.

So WeaveWater did what it does best. The weavers stitched every Calling Cloth that had come into one great cloth, and hung it across the Summoning Square. Then the whole town turned out, and every Threadling in WeaveWater added a stitch of their own and pinned on a scrap or an old keepsake: a corner of a house pattern, a First Fold song with no last verse, and among them a button, a thimble and a needle. Tibb TwillTwist carried the great cloth across the square to the Sacred Sewing Machine. Wist WishWeaver, the town's resident KnitWitch, began the long ritual, and kept watch all night as the machine thrummed through its work, while the Clack carried on around her as it always does.

By morning, the StoryWeaver of this story had been sewn, carrying a little of WeaveWater and a little of everyone who had called, and woke to a world in peril. With the button, the thimble and the needle, they set out for Frays End, guided by Tess TreadleFoot, the town's young runner, who knows every path out of WeaveWater. Wist stayed behind with the Sacred Sewing Machine, ready for the next Calling. See Threadbare Plot.

"StoryWeaver, I'm so glad you've come." -- Wist WishWeaver - KnitWitch of WeaveWater

Notable Residents

Wist WishWeaver - The resident KnitWitch of WeaveWater, who tends the Sacred Sewing Machine. She ran the ritual that sewed the StoryWeaver, and kept watch through the night.
Mabel MillRace - Keeper of the Summoning Square, who knows the story behind every Calling Cloth on its lines. Her family kept the Mill Race clear for generations before her.
Ossie OverShot - Bargemaster of First Fold, who has steered more cloth down the Long Warp than anyone alive, and says so. Born in the Overshot Mills, and named for them.
Maddie MadderMoss - Master Dyer of the Walls, whose hands have been stained a different colour every day of her life. She knows every pattern the Dyers have ever made, and has never written one down.
Tibb TwillTwist - The Patchling who carried the great Calling Cloth across the Summoning Square to the Sacred Sewing Machine.
Tess TreadleFoot - The town's young runner and errand-weaver, named for the loom's foot pedal, who knows every path out of WeaveWater. She guides the StoryWeaver on the perilous path to Frays End.

Narrative Function

WeaveWater is where the StoryWeaver's story begins: a bright, busy, ordinary town, full of colour and the Clack, that happens to keep the one machine in Threadbare that can sew a hero. It establishes from the very first scene that a StoryWeaver is made by many hands calling for help, and that every StoryWeaver carries a debt of love to people they have never met. It also shows the StoryWeaver what they are setting out to protect, before they walk into a world that is fraying at its edges.

For Contributors

Listen for the Clack. A WeaveWater scene is full of sound: looms, waterwheels, shuttles and singing. When it is quiet, something is wrong.
Every colour has its place. The dye vats run around the walls in order, from the reds of Madder Gate to the blues of the Indigo Steps. Dyers' patterns are drawn into the cloth by binding, folding, waxing and stitching before dyeing.
Weave with the river. Every famous WeaveWater weave depends on the river's pace and the season. New weaves should follow the same rule, and be named in the joined style of RiverTwill and WheelCheck.
Everything is woven. Bridges, blankets, banners and bunting. Every family has its own house pattern.
Many hands. WeaveWater's stories are about people doing things together. The Sacred Sewing Machine was built by many hands, and a Calling can only be made by many voices.
Bright and busy. WeaveWater is thriving. Its scenes are full of colour, bunting, mischief and work. The Void is news that arrives on the barges, not something in the streets.

Wiki Notes

Open threads to settle as the entry firms up:

The society of the Calling. The Threadlings who keep the custom of the Calling need a name. Candidates: the Sewing Circle, the Common Thread, the Calling Circle.
The Sacred Sewing Machine may need a page of its own.

Connections

StoryWeaver - sewn in the Summoning Square, every one of them
Threadbare Plot - which begins in WeaveWater
LinenVille - upriver neighbours and fond rivals, who spin what WeaveWater weaves
RagPies - who nest on every mill wheel and raid the Drying Lines
Frays End - where WeaveWater's bolts are carried on First Fold
The Fraying - from whose border towns Calling Cloths reach WeaveWater
The Void - the danger every StoryWeaver is sewn to stand against
BobbleBleats - whose wool fills WeaveWater's looms
FoldFlax - spun in LinenVille, woven in WeaveWater
MordantMaples - whose bark makes WeaveWater's colours hold fast
The World of Threadbare - the lore, landscape and denizens of Threadbare