Weaving with Feeling

We all do that right? Pour our little hearts into the planning and warping and the weaving. Agonize over setts, tension and lets not forget color and fibers. Of course we do, whether we are knitting, quilting, painting, weaving or any other thing that we might be creating from scratch.

Yesterday I wove prayer flags and I have Sarah over at Woven Voices to thank big time for the idea. Now, she would (and did) say good ideas come from the cosmos and that's true enough, but I can directly trace my wanting to weave these right back to her, so Thank You Sarah!

For the last four days I have been writing both personal notes and letters and also prescribed prayers on fabric. Let me back up a bit, over the course of 2005-2007 I had to put 3 of my old girls to sleep; Sam, Lexie and Sammie-Bug. They are all buried in their own blankies out in a special area of our back yard. I'm not a fancy person, so they each got a cairn of stones, and I had found prayer flags with the Rainbow Bridge prayer printed on them. It soothed me at a terrible time. Now three years later, the flags really have given up everything to the wind and need to be replaced. What better way than to weave my own with my own messages to the Nuns ( none of this and none of that, they were funny old ladies that always traveled together).  The fabric I bought contained all the colors, yellow, green, red, white and blue. My warp also contained those colors in the prescribed order.

 Thoughts and words are intent and there was a lot to say to those 3 and some beautiful prayers people had sent and others I found.  Writing on fabric strips is slow

but I got it all in. The cotton strips hold my special words to them, the silk, prayers to the universe, the woven cotton shots between again in color order. The sticks are dogwood, the little medal in the middle is a Good Dog prayer ring. It would normally go on their collars. And of course, bells!

 The three special flags have been cut off the loom, there will be a few more woven on this warp, for friends. 

Along with the 3 flags you get a nice bonus shot of Pogo. It's pretty cute that every time he gets up to rearrange himself  his ears bump the bells.  We had a lot of bell ringing when these were first hung with everyone coming over for a sniff.

We will burn the old flags and put these up on an auspicious day. There won't be 5 inches of new snow on the ground, the cairns will be restacked, hopefully all the daffodils will be blooming, the sun shining and a good soft breeze will start sending all the love in these flags out.