Teegrye's clothes were starting to wear out again. Her father didn't care much since she wasn't allowed to go outside, and keeping her properly clothed wasn't going to increase her dowry. She wasn't stupid though, but she did know from conversations she overheard tidbits on various topics. She did her best to extrapolate.

She had been taught how to sew by hand with a needle, how to keep a needle sharp and keep it from rusting. She knew how to clean a house and prepare food, and very little else was needed for a jumi girl. While wondering what marriage would be like, she snagged her outermost skirt on a thick sliver of wood coming from the back of a breaking chair, and it tore.

It took so long and so much thread to fix any clothes, she wondered if there was a faster way to do it. Maybe she could find a better material that wouldn't rip as easily at least. Her father was sick lately, but still went out to catch fish with the woven net. This morning, however, when pulling the net from the hangars on the wall, he slipped and the edge of the net came off. Not enough to ruin the net, only enough to have an arm's length left on the floor. Like a good girl, she picked it up to keep the area clean. It couldn't be properly fixed back onto the fishing net, and her dress had an obvious rip on her left hip, so why not just add the net piece onto her dress? The colors were close to the same now that they were old and stained with dust.

There were old clothes that her family didn't have new members to grow into, and the cloth would be valuable as pieces of patching to fix other clothes. She was taught how to do that, but it had to be the same kind of material, she had always been told. After a few years of periodic bad fishing, she made an attempt to fix up the dress she'd been in constant repair of with other materials. Fishing net scraps, old clothes of different materials, all sorts of things.

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One day when cleaning a window frame, she saw a brightly colored piece of fabric fluttering in the breeze, and get caught on a bush. She wished so badly that she could go out, just this once, for a moment to pick it up. But she knew that wasn't allowed. She went on throughout the day, taking care of her duties. The next morning, she noticed the colored cloth sitting near her bedding. She wasted no time in adding it to her dress! There was no one to show off to, but it made her happy. She just made sure to add the scrap onto one of her inside dresses. She was wearing four of them all the time, so there was room.

Other little scraps appeared in her room over time. Some were colorful linen, some soft leather not yet made into armor, some were normal cloth. At one point, Teegrye even tried to put together new cloth from the frayed threads coming off of her other clothes on her family's loom, which luckily worked!

Her father was very angry at her the day he realized that materials kept appearing. She was accused for being a thief, but no one in the village had seen her go outside, or even remembered he had a daughter. No one reported any clothing or anything else missing, either. She was still punished, but it could have been worse. Her legs and hands would heal for the most part.

A couple years went by of her tending the house and the household clothing. Her mother had passed quite some time ago, and it was only her and her father. No one had wanted to buy her, and so she got married to her father.

Teegrye's dress was very pretty and a brightly colored patchwork of patterns and textures by then. She had even learned how to turn cobwebs into thread, and make cloth out of it. The new fishing net was much better- her husband hadn't complained about bad fishing since she made it.

But she wasn't able to make babies, and her husband became very angry at her. He had been angry with her since the first cloth showed up, which even she didn't know how that happened. One day, there was a knock on the door. She opened it, and there stood her husband- standing behind some soldiers.

...

Back at the castle, a flower pot got a new etching so her core could be fit into its artwork.