Made for Woolerina by Waverley Mills in Tasmania, this blanket has been made with love, to be loved by you and your family for generations to come.
Waste has always bothered us at Woolerina and over the past 10 years we have carefully collected all the off-cuts from our cutting room, while we worked on finding a way for this waste to be used.
When Woolerina first began, all of our garment cutting and sewing was outsourced to a garment maker in Sydney - we delivered rolls of fabric and then collected sewn and packaged garments a few months later.
We didn't see the waste, we just knew we received 25% less weight than we had delivered.
When we first began cutting in-house back in 2015, we became acutely aware of the waste and there began our quest to find a way to re-purpose the fabric off-cuts!
There have been many paths we have headed down, the first being to have the off-cuts shredded and used in a felt matting, mostly used in the automotive industry. In order to pursue this, we needed two tonnes of off-cuts...! We spent a number of years accumulating this large amount and when we had finally hit that target, we were very disappointed to learn that this opportunity was no longer available in Australia; with two tonnes of off-cuts now on our hands, the challenge was now on to find a use for them!
"FABRIC RE-PURPOSING HAS BEEN IN MY THOUGHTS FOR MANY YEARS AND THIS PROJECT IS THE CULMINATION OF NEARLY 10 YEARS WORK."
Warwick Rolfe, Woolerina
With much research into potential uses for the fabric off-cuts, it became apparent that the best way to finding a new use for them, was to begin by shredding the fabric, to "strip it back", returning it to a similar consistency of raw wool. We purchased a small shredding machine to enable us to do this and to begin experimenting.
Over the course of the last five-or-so years, we have made many connections with many people from many industries and from around the world as we experimented with different opportunities.
Creating a yarn from blended off-cuts and raw wool became the idea that felt most closely aligned with Woolerina and also, the most successful of our experiments. We were excited to learn of Waverley Mills' ability to create the yarn we were seeking on a commercial scale, and then a blanket from this yarn - finally the stars were aligning! Warwick has worked closely with Waverley Mills, Australia's oldest working textile mill, to develop the yarn used in this collection and subsequently the blanket that is the end result.
Each time we cut garments at Woolerina, we sort our off-cuts into colours. When Warwick traveled to Tasmania to meet with the Waverley Mills team, he was able to take specific colour palettes from which to create different coloured yarns. These off-cuts were shredded and then blended with virgin wool in a ratio of 30% off-cuts to 70% wool fibre to create a new 100% wool yarn. Whilst the off-cuts used are "block colours", the yarn has a marle effect as a result of being mixed with natural-coloured wool.
"Your job was in so many ways a great experience for Waverley to be involved with. Thank you for the opportunity."
Penny Rundle, Waverley Mills
This limited collection of 128 blankets was woven at Waverley Mills. Each blanket is entirely unique as a result of the off-cuts used which have been collected from many season's colour palettes.
This project makes all of us at Woolerina immensely proud and we are thrilled to be sharing it with you.
With love, The Woolerina Family. xx
