b2mem | Aragorn-inspired yarn by lirin (Reply)

B2MeM Prompt, Card and Number: Aspects of Aragorn - Traveller (O67)
Format: yarn
Genre: n/a
Rating: G
Warnings: kludgy HTML (sorry, mobile users, photo captions may go wandering a bit for you)
Characters: Aragorn (well, sort of)
Pairings: n/a
Summary: Handspun camel/silk yarn, and why it is representative of Aragorn.

This is my spinning wheel. It's an Ashford Traveller (that I named Kivrin, after a character in one of my other fandoms). Ashford has been making spinning wheels since the 1940s, and the Traveller design dates back to the 1970s, although my wheel is far younger than that. When I saw "Traveller" pop up on the Aspects of Aragorn card a couple weeks ago, I decided I wanted to take the prompt very far afield, and spin some yarn on my Traveller that I felt would be representative of Aragorn.

Ashford Traveller "Kivrin"

A bit about spinning: I spun the yarn out of camel/silk top. "Top" is fiber that's been taken off of the animal, washed, and then combed so that all the little individual fibers point the same direction. Spinning fiber into yarn is all about drafting the fiber out and attenuating it until it's the width that you want it to be, and then adding twist. The drive wheel on the spinning wheel is much larger than the whorl of the flyer (that's the mechanism on the top that is actually twisting the yarn, and then winding the newly-made yarn onto the bobbin). This means that every time I treadle to spin the drive wheel once, the flyer spins several times (15 for the ratio I was using to make this particular yarn), and adds plenty of twist into the yarn I'm making.

spinning the singles

Anyway, that's a little bit of background about how spinning works...now an explanation of why I think this yarn is representative of Aragorn!

So I chose this fiber because it's kind of a plain color, maybe even a bit uninteresting at first glance, but there's more to it than meets the eye. Unfortunately this part can't be conveyed in photographs, but you guys, this yarn is so soft, it's amazing! I've got it sitting next to me on my desk, and I can't stop petting and touching it. One might say, with only slight exaggeration ('cause I actually don't dislike the color), that it looks foul and feels fair. Also, the fiber is a blend of fiber from two different sources—camel and silk—which is suited to Aragorn's mixed heritage of both Men and Elves.

undyed camel/silk top

Once you've spun one strand (called "singles"), you can either knit with that, or you can ply the singles with other singles (this is what's done for most yarn or thread you'll run across in the fabrics in your life). In singles, all the twist is going in one direction, leading to bottled-up tension and potential energy in the yarn that can create biased fabric in the finished project. I didn't think this was at all suited to Aragorn, so I decided I wanted to make a plied yarn. In plied yarn, multiple singles are twisted together in the opposite direction that the singles were twisted, thus balancing the yarn so there is no built-up tension in the finished yarn. My choice of number of plies (two) was mainly practical—if I'm only dividing my total yardage of singles by two instead of three or more, I have a higher finished yardage to work with—but let's say that the two plies combining into a finished yarn is also representative of the way Aragorn recombined the kingdoms of Gondor and Arnor. :-)