‘A beautiful display of love’: company launches DIY funeral shroud cover kit | Death and dying

In the days leading up to his wife Claire’s death, Andrew Kent sat with her and talked about fabric leaves. She wanted them in different shades – greens, browns and golds, the colours she saw on walks.

Later, after she died, each of her three children would take one home. The others would be stitched to the wool cover Andrew was designing for his wife’s funeral shroud – the soft wrap she had chosen instead of a coffin.

“The shroud cover took away the anonymity of the traditional coffin,” Kent said. “It meant that during the funeral, we were looking at designs that made us think of her life rather than at a cold, anonymous box.”

This weekend at the Bovey Tracey craft festival, a Devon company that has spent more than two decades making bespoke woollen funeral shrouds and covers will launch mail-order kits allowing people to create their own personalised shroud covers.

“It cuts across a lot of taboos but I think it’s more beneficial if people make the covers themselves,” said Bellacouche’s founder, Yuli Sømme. “You get more out of it in terms of wellbeing and the conversations you have with other people while you’re working on it.”

The launch follows growing interest in alternatives to traditional funerals. Green burials are becoming more popular, while ash reefs and other unconventional memorials have attracted attention in recent years.

The £155 heirloom cover kit includes a felt cover in one of three sizes, a needle-felting tool, needles, wool and access to online tutorials. Users can add dyed wool fibres and naturally dyed felt to create their own designs.

After the launch, Sømme will hand her business over to four local people, including two former customers, who hope to expand its reach. Among the ideas they want to explore are shroud covers for pets and workshops in schools, hospices and care homes.

Ysanne Friend, one of the potential buyers, is designing a shroud cover for herself. “I don’t expect to die any time soon,” she said. “But I’ve experienced three deaths and three births in the past decade, and I’m finding it very healthy and comforting to think about my relationship to death now rather than when it’s suddenly at my door.”

Sømme said she was selling her business after 22 years because demand had become too great. “I get inquiries about personalised shroud covers every day and commissions at least once a week,” she said. That, and the popularity of her workshops, helped convince her there was demand for a version people could complete at home.

Over the years, Sømme has created shroud covers featuring helicopters, banjos, gardening implements, sheepdogs, crows – and several Spitfire aircraft. “They’re incredibly popular for some reason,” she said.

Her interest in shrouds began after her father died when she was five. “I used to find it very comforting to wrap myself in his cardigan,” she said. Sømme later developed a technique for making woollen shrouds. After exhibiting some as artworks, she began receiving commissions.

One was from Christel Goodwin. After Goodwin’s husband, Brian, died, students, friends and family were invited to contribute designs to his shroud cover. There were so many that some had to be placed inside the shroud; one friend recreated the moon exactly as it appeared on the night Brian died.

“It was such a beautiful display of love,” Goodwin said. “The process of making the designs triggered so many different stories about Brian. It was an act of love expressed in beauty.”

But Rupert Callender, of the Green Funeral Company, said interest in personalised funerals, which had steadily increased during his 26 years in the industry, was now facing an “existential threat”.

“I’ve never been busier but we’re fighting against the reality of living in a time where there’s a massive financial squeeze and the prices [from] the venture capitalists, who offer processes like direct cremation, seem irresistible,” he said. “That’s the existential threat to the personalisation of funerals.”