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Wyn WoolWind
Name: Wyn WoolWind
Title / Role: Collector of scraps, keeper of the largest ball of wool in Threadbare
Species: Threadling
Core Thread: Memory
Home: A cottage and an outsized barn on the edge of Frays End
Status: Active
Themes: Patience, Thrift, Kindness, Small Things, Things That Add Up
"I only ever added a bit at a time. You don't notice, do you, until it's bigger than the barn?"
-- Wyn WoolWind
Wyn WoolWind is a kind old Threadling who lives on the edge of Frays End. For many an age she has collected scraps of wool: odd ends from the KnitWitches, unravelled jumpers, the last few inches left on a skein, the fluff from the bottom of a basket. She ties every scrap to the last, and rolls it on, onto a single ball.
That ball is now the largest in Threadbare. It outgrew her parlour, then her shed, and now fills an outsized barn of its own. Wyn has never thought of it as a collection. She simply cannot bear to see good wool thrown away.
Wyn is gentle, unhurried and endlessly patient. She is always the first to offer a cup of tea, and the last to notice that anything remarkable is going on. Her pockets are always full of loose ends, and most Threadlings in Frays End have, at one time or another, handed her a scrap on their way past.
To wind wool is to gather it in, turn by turn, until a tangle becomes something tidy and whole. Wyn has wound wool every day of her life, and she says it is the most restful thing she knows. Every turn of the ball is a small kindness to a scrap that would otherwise have been lost.
Nobody knows how many miles of wool are in Wyn's ball, and Wyn has never tried to count. Every colour in Threadbare is in there somewhere, along with a good many colours nobody can name. Some say that if you could unwind it all the way to the middle, you would find the very first scrap Wyn ever saved.
The ball has a mind of its own. In the early hours of one Sunday, the barn door gave way and the ball rolled out, down the lane and through the streets of Frays End, unwinding as it went. Strangest of all, it does not seem to get any smaller, however far it rolls. The Daily Yarn reported the whole affair, see Pleat Street.
Every scrap in the ball once belonged to something: a scarf, a blanket, a sock, a pair of mittens. Wyn remembers where most of them came from, and will happily tell you, if you have an afternoon to spare. In that sense the ball is a kind of history of Frays End, wound up small, and Wyn is its keeper.
Wyn is a warm, comic character for stories about small things adding up to something big. She shows that patience and care, a little at a time, can make something remarkable, and that nothing is too small to keep.
For contributors, Wyn is the right voice for gentle, cosy humour, and for any story about collecting, saving, reusing or mending. The runaway ball makes a natural setting for chases, tangles and lost-and-found quests across Frays End, and every scrap in it can carry a small story of its own.
- Frays End - her home, on the edge of town
- KnitWitches - who give her their odd ends
- Pleat Street - where The Daily Yarn reported the runaway ball
- The Full Stop - whose Lost and Found took in everything the ball picked up
- Threadlings - the people of Threadbare
- The World of Threadbare - the lore, landscape and denizens of Threadbare
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