Recycled Wool Used In This Handmade, 20 ft Long Tapestry of the World

Watch this amazing 20 ft long tapestry by Textile artist Vanessa Barragão. Handmade with ancestral methods such as latch hook, crochet, and felt; the 20 x 6.5 ft (600 x 200 cm) tapestry used 8 kg (18 lbs) of jute and cotton and 42 kg (93 lbs) of recycled wool. It took Barragão and her team more than 520 hours to finish.

The tapestry can be found hanging inside London’s Heathrow Airport and was completed last July. The project was a partnership between Heathrow and Kew Gardens and Barragão was commissioned to create the large-scale artwork.

In continuation of her previous works, the artist highlights present environmental concerns as the piece is punctuated with such threatened species as the coral reefs and protected plants around the world — these include cypripedium calceolus and pulsatilla vulgaris in Europe, ginkgo biloba in China, and the orchid bulbophyllum ankylochele in Indonesia. [source]