Penelope weaves and unravels the shroud to buy time. With Odysseus absent for twenty years and no news of him, nobles from Ithaca and the neighboring islands court her and eat the goods of the house, and they expect her to choose one of them. She neither refuses nor accepts, and the cloth she prepares for her father-in-law, the old Laertes, is the pretext with which she postpones the decision.
The stratagem is told three times in the poem, in three voices. In the second book, Antinous describes it before the assembly: Penelope asked them to wait until she finished a great web, "a shroud for the hero Laertes," so that no Achaean woman would reproach her for letting him be buried without one. By day she wove, and at night, by torchlight, she unravelled. She deceived the suitors for three years, until a servant denounced her and they caught her unravelling the cloth, and she had to finish it, against her will. In Book XIX, Penelope herself tells the story to the beggar, and in the last book the soul of one of the suitors recounts it in Hades.
The loom gives Penelope a weapon the poem values. Antinous, in accusing her, acknowledges the skill that Athena gave her in her work and a cunning that, he says, no woman of the past had. The shroud serves because it is a legitimate request: honoring the father-in-law with a worthy burial is a duty respected by all, and no suitor can refuse it without seeming disrespectful. There is also an irony: the shroud would cover an old man who is alive and whom, at the end, Odysseus finds in the orchard.
When the stratagem falls apart, Penelope tells the beggar that she can no longer escape the marriage nor find another plan: her parents press her, and her son, now a man, grieves over the goods devoured. It is then that she proposes the contest of Odysseus's bow, the second postponement, which ends up helping her husband return. The poem thus shows a waiting that is not passive: while the men decide by banquet and arms, she decides by time.