Ideas to book: Weaving Hope

Welcome to another round of idea to book! Today, we’re talking about Weaving Hope, set in 1927. There are three things I was lokoing forward to exploring in this book. (Well more than three.) They are having fun with tapestry weaving, someone taking over a large home they’re not familiar with (with some secrets!), and people building new lives after the Great War. 

Tapestries

I knew when I started thinking about the Mysterious Arts series and the different kinds of arts I wanted to include that weaving should be one of them. I am not a weaver, I knit, but the chance to play with that much colour is delightful. I did take a weaving class to get a sense for how things work, and what weaving feels like in the body, though! 

In Weaving Hope, I also wanted to spend a little time with the woman who became Ferry’s apprentice mistress after the events of Outcrossing. Ferry has a modest amount of magic at her disposal in terms of power. But she has a delicate touch with it. That’s exactly the right combination for working restoring delicate threads in a tapestry. 

Eda does weave cloth. But her particular love is tapestry work. That’s a whole different technique, and mending and restoring them is even more of a specialised process. I watched a lot of videos of tapestry restoration, along with reading a lot about how the massive tapestries were made. 

(And of course, I thought a lot about what they depicted, but that gets into spoilers!) 

One of the things I loved was thinking about how magic made some of this easier. Eda uses a variety of techniques to stabilise that large – heavy – tapestry while she’s working on repairs. There are charms to get a proper, proportioned sketch of the work and the damaged spots, so she can plan the needed tasks. And once the restoration is done, there are illusion charms to help keep it looking brilliant and unfaded, the way it was designed, even centuries after it was made.

A manor

Kiya had been saying for a while that I ought to do a large manor that had a plot, but was not creepy. (The house in Mistress of Birds definitely has some creepy!) I loved the idea of a home that someone had inherited unexpectedly. Jeremy didn’t grow up with that kind of house or those kinds of expectations.

And yet, here he is, he’s inherited a place and the people working in that place. He wants to do well by them, but he’s not at all sure what that involves. Every time he turns around, there are rules about doing things right he hasn’t quite learned yet. Like how to address the staff, or what their roles are. And then, of course, there are the actual mysteries of the house and the gardens. 

It’s not that Jeremy doesn’t know anything. When he’s in the realm of what he’s done for work, he knows how to talk about what he’s doing. Which pieces matter. Which ones stray into a conflict of interest. He can figure out how you pay an expert to do things an expert does, or arrange a cart for a visit in a town he’s never been to. 

I also loved getting to play with some of the larger social expectations. What other people think about Jeremy and his house, and what he should do now. Including Jeremy. 

Building new lives after the War

A lot of this book is quietly about building new lives after the Great War. Eda’s done a lot of that, after her husband’s death in France. (Even if she comes to some new realisations about her marriage over the course of the book.) 

And then there are the two young gardeners on the estate, so fleetingly visible they’re rather like rabbits darting off in the garden. They’ve made a good quiet life for themselves that works for them. And they’ve got Gerald Waters fiercely making sure they keep having that space and stability. (Also, he’s turning them into quite good gardeners in the process.) 

Something a little quieter

As a bonus extra, I also wanted something quieter. This was the book I wrote after the Mysterious Fields trilogy. Those three books are rather more intense than many of mine (and the process of writing them was more intense). Taking a breather and enjoying the quiet here was delightful. The book has a slower pace. It lingers more in some of the sensory pleasures – flowers, scent, singing, the colours and textures of weaving. 

That’s our look at the ideas behind Weaving Hope!