‘I’m standing in front of a huge pile of newly shorn sheep fleece, pillow upon pillow of texture, colour, and light. The virgin wool is so ravishing I feel somehow changed. I ask the shearer what it’s worth, “nothing” is his reply. “You’ll have to burn it. Or bury it.”

That’s how it started.’

Ex fashion editor and accidental sheep farmere, Julia’s epiphany came during her first experience of shearing day, the annual event where sheep must be relieved of their heavy winter fleeces to face the heat of summer in the best possible health. Hearing that this miraculous by-product was worthless was unacceptable to her, and set her on her journey of discovery into everything wool, and to finding the holy grail of techniques that would enable her to present this extraordinary fibre in it’s very purest form. That journey would became Slow Wool Design – slow being a reflection of the four seasons it takes for a sheep to grow its fleece, slow like the rhythms of nature, and the meticulous work involved in producing her designs. Using ancient wet felting techniques and the untreated wool from often endangered sheep breeds, Julia turns an ostensibly worthless by-product into contemporary 3D landscapes, holding a mirror not only to the beauty of one of the planet’s oldest renewable animal fibres, but also the to abject waste of a Europe-wide wool industry that is in a shocking, steady decline.