The Thread back Home

Jayne Babine steaming her handwoven commission — one of the limited works now hanging at Newport Harbor Island Resort, made to be touched.

The incident happened on an ordinary afternoon in Warren. A banner outside a building. A husband who noticed it. A woman who had nothing to lose by stopping.

Jayne knew nothing about weaving when she walked into the Handkerchief Factory. She signed up for a two-hour class, made a kitchen towel on a floor loom, and understood immediately that something had shifted — though she could not yet say what.

She would not have the word for it until her mother visited the studio, sometime around 2022, and supplied it without ceremony:

your grandmother was a master weaver of bed linens.

This is the kind of knowledge that does not surprise so much as confirm. The loom had recognized her before she recognized herself.

The loom had recognized her before she recognized herself.

In the years since, Jayne has woven commissioned art for a Newport hotel, taught her daughter to thread a warp, and sat at a loom through her father's final days — weaving the colors of the seven chakras while his life, far away in Thailand, quietly ended.

She calls it meditation.

"Weaving is meditation"

She calls it control when control was gone. She does not call it therapy, but she does not need to.

Her story is in our inaugural issue. The thread, it turns out, runs a very long way back home.