paganism

"Huginn and Muninn fly high every day

Over the wide world;

I fear for Huginn that he will not return,

Yet more I tremble for Muninn."

I finally finished my Raven belt! Its over 900 turns, and is almost exactly 100 inches long. Its slightly shorter than my Amleth belt, which was the previous longest belt I'd ever done. This one's pattern was specifically plotted out in its entirety all at once rather than repeating a pattern over and over like my other belts. I had to use an image editing program (krita at first then I switched to Gimp) to compile the smaller patterns from TwistedThreads into one image, then track my position.

This is the first belt I've done with any real religious significance, despite the fact that I consider my weaving to be a religious act in and of itself. It depicts Oðinn's ravens Huginn and Muninn, Thought and Memory, one white and one black. I've always thought of Muninn as being a white raven, a counter to his brother Huginn who's a normal black raven.

The long twisting knotwork pattern in the center represents both the act of weaving, and the very structure of our universe. The Norns weaving our reality together from disparate systems, interconnected and intertwined into one whole. The three threads that make up the knot represent the three dimensions, and the waters of the three cosmological wells: Urðr's Well in Ásgarðr, Mímir's Well in Jötunheimr, and the Hvergelmir in Niflheim. The color flips also form a sort of Yin-Yang as the larger white half has a small black section in its center, and the larger black half has a small white section inside it.

An important aspect of the way the pattern works on this is that when the colors flip from black to white, only the thick center knot actually changes color. The thin black line becomes a white outline that matches the black outline, which itself turns to a single thin white line. This is my way of representing the Dialectical nature of our reality, and that it is the contradiction between the background color and the inner color that defines the shape of the thread.