Broken threads

Very early yesterday morning, I was reading my facebook page when an instant message popped up from Dave. Dave was my assistant manager at the outdoor store I managed in the '80's and '90's, before I started my new life as a pastry chef. We lost touch when I moved away from Tucson in 1998. He isn't the high school kid I hired anymore; he has a wife and a son, a house and a career, a life far removed from me, but one that facebook brought into my life again.
As I work through the center's challenge project, using a warp made of cotton yarn from a previous challenge, I notice stray threads now and then, laying off to the side. Empty dent spaces on the sides of the warp show where those threads once were, and empty heddles sway in between filled ones. As previously noted, the first item I'm weaving will be the one I keep, but those threads are going to have to be eventually brought back in. After I wove the hem and before I started the new one, I pulled the threads through their heddles and reed spaces and walked away for a few hours, pondering how best to bring them back in. I don't like to simply tie them on to other threads and wait for them to weave in, because the constant chaffing of the reed will either break the thread in another place or break the knot.
The solution came as I sat in my sewing room--separate from the loom room, of course!--when I saw a jar of safety pins. I pinned the threads to the finished piece and carefully wove them into the hem of the second one. I've left a tail long enough to weave in later, and the safety pins seem to be holding the tension well enough.
As to what caused the broken threads, I have a couple of theories. The original plan for the project was through an 8 dent reed, not a 12 dent, so the warp was wound on farther spaced than it should be, and the threads are being pulled into a more narrow space on the reed. Another theory is the newest member of my family, Weft, who appropriately enough loves to play on the warps of both my looms. He can easily run down one to jump onto the other, and loves to pop out the top to look around.
I've mended the broken threads in my life via facebook, mending friendships and beginning new ones. Mending actual threads takes a little more effort, but is also time well spent.
Happy Weaving!
Maggie