Nuno felt wrap

Kimberley, nuno felt wrap

I recently made a nuno felt wrap, the first one I’ve made for a while.

It’s simply two layers of white superfine merino carded with a small amount of a blend of black merino and flax with natural silk fibres.  Separating the two layers of wool fibre is fine white tissue silk fabric that shows very subtly in the areas between the triangles of fleece.  There’s loose silk fabric band along one edge and a fringe at one end.

Being superfine wool it feels so soft, and weighing only 80 grams (nearly 3 ounces) it’s very light and drapable.  You can wear it in different ways to feature either the fringed end or the silk band.

My inspiration came from browsing aerial images of the Australian landscape on the internet.  I found a great online album of the photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand who seems to spend his time seeing the landscape from above. This is his website http://www.yannarthusbertrand2.org.  In this nuno felt wrap I was trying to capture the ripples in the sand of Arthus-Bertrand’s image of the Buccaneer Archipelago in the Kimberley area of coastal north-west Australia.

Although not very successfully, I was trying to create ripples in the silk fabric by laying the wool fleece vertically and rolling across the width of the wrap.  In theory it should work, but maybe it needs more rolling to get those ripples happening.