"It is the sort of thing you learn young and is a mystery even then. But yet you do it every day. Wrap it the right way, and I have seen women fight it, and even in the heat of battle, astride a horse, it does not come free."
For there is only this one long stretch of fabric that she suspends between her two hands and then gestures with it - "Your gown, my lady." And once she is free of it, Lakshmi moves to begin to intricate task of dressing someone in a saree. At the front, one end is tied to a middle point of the fabric, and tightly so. Enough that no matter how it was tugged, it would not come free. That almost too rough only a woman could be with another woman when it came to such things. The fabric pinched and pulled to hold secure.
Then she spools out an arm's length, drops it away clear, and starts back at the end closest to Alexandrie's body. The fabric reaching the floor to make up the skirt. Not the flowing sweep of an Orleasan skirt, stiffer from the heavy silk patterning. As it begins to take shape, it curves about the body. But for now, from that close point and between her fingers, Lakshmi begins to make pleat after pleat and pinches it tightly to make sure it doesn't move. Her eyes down on her work as she stands close to do it, fills the empty air with idle chatter. "For different drapes, there are different types of fabric, lengths, such things. But women have been wearing such things for centuries."
no subject
For there is only this one long stretch of fabric that she suspends between her two hands and then gestures with it - "Your gown, my lady." And once she is free of it, Lakshmi moves to begin to intricate task of dressing someone in a saree. At the front, one end is tied to a middle point of the fabric, and tightly so. Enough that no matter how it was tugged, it would not come free. That almost too rough only a woman could be with another woman when it came to such things. The fabric pinched and pulled to hold secure.
Then she spools out an arm's length, drops it away clear, and starts back at the end closest to Alexandrie's body. The fabric reaching the floor to make up the skirt. Not the flowing sweep of an Orleasan skirt, stiffer from the heavy silk patterning. As it begins to take shape, it curves about the body. But for now, from that close point and between her fingers, Lakshmi begins to make pleat after pleat and pinches it tightly to make sure it doesn't move. Her eyes down on her work as she stands close to do it, fills the empty air with idle chatter. "For different drapes, there are different types of fabric, lengths, such things. But women have been wearing such things for centuries."