Eco Colour: Botanical Dyes for Beautiful Textiles

by India Flint

Overview

The essence of plants bursts forth in magnificent hues and surprising palettes. Using dyes of the leaves, roots, and flowers to color your cloth and yarn can be an amazing journey into botanical alchemy. In Eco Colour, artistic dyer and colorist India Flint teaches you how to cull and use this gentle and ecologically sustainable alternative to synthetic dyes.

India explores the fascinating and infinitely variable world of plant color using a wide variety of techniques and recipes. From whole-dyed cloth and applied color to prints and layered dye techniques, India describes only ecologically sustainable plant-dye methods. She uses renewable resources and shows how to do the least possible harm to the dyer, the end user of the object, and the environment. Recipes include a number of entirely new processes developed by India, as well as guidelines for plant collection, directions for the distillation of nontoxic mordants, and methodologies for applying plant dyes.

Eco Colour inspires both the home dyer and textile professional seeking to extend their skills using India's successful methods.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781596683303
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/14/2010
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 10.70(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

India Flint is a designer, artist, writer, and sheep farmer. Her work has been greatly influenced by her extensive travels—from Melbourne to rural Austria to Montreal. She is known for the development of the highly distinctive eco-print, an ecologically sustainable plant-based printing process giving brilliant color to cloth. Flint has been working with plant dyes for more than twenty years, and she has artwork in a myriad of collections and museums in Australia, Latvia, and Germany. She currently lives in South Australia.

Table of Contents

Prologue

What this book is for

Part One
Before You Begin
Natural Dyes – a context
Discovering dyes
Dyeing and cooking: some links
The true cost of synthetic dyes
Regionalism
A renewable color palette

Collecting Plants – a protocol
Backyards and gardens
What’s in a name?
Garbage and windfalls

Part Two
The Workspace
Equipment and a place to work
Equipment
Storing samples
On the Road

Harvesting and storing plants for dyeing
Safe practices

Part Three
Natural Dyestuffs
Some traditional dye materials
The edible dye garden

Part Four
Preparing, Processing and Applying Dyes
Preparing to dye
Treating the fiber before dyeing
Animal Fibers
Plant fibers

Mordants
Wool
Cotton
Silk
Looking for alternatives
Tannin
Protein
Alkalis
Acids
Metals
Method of mordant assessment
Pre-mordants

Processing plant dyes
Dye application processes
Some curiosities to be derived from sequential extractions

Part Five
Some Special Dyeplant Groups
Eucalyptus dyes
Beyond the eucalyptus
Ice-flower dyes
Process
Variations
Plants to try
Fruits and berries

Part Six
Special Effects
Cold-bundled eco-prints
Fixing the color
What next?
Non-eucalyptus eco-prints using hot-bundling
Hapa-zome – beating color into cloth
Dyeing wool yarn and silver
Basic procedure
Dyeing multicolored yarns and silver in a microwave oven
Multicolored yarns using scrap metals and plant dyes
Multicolored yarns
Printing with plant dyes
Using shibori techniques and layered dyeing
Hexagonal or honeycomb patterns
Tartan patterns
Checkerboard patterns
Multicolored fabrics
Resists
Block printing
Batik – wax resist
Egg
Solar Dyeing
Process
Mud and cow patties
Mud
Cow patties

Part Seven
Some Other Considerations
The importance of water
The importance of time
Caring for cloth
Silk
Wool
Cotton, linen, ramie and hemp
Disposal of wastes
Liquids
Vegetable matter

Part Eight

References

Further reading

Websites

Index

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Editorial Reviews

"If you've ever worried about the effect dyeing fabric has on the earth, Eco Colour by India Flint will teach you how to use botanical dyes to create beautiful textiles." - Cutoutandkeep.net

"A beautifully presented book...if you are interested in botanical dyes, this is a definite must read." - Shuttle, Spindle & Dyepot

"Slow dyes, like slow foods, require time and effort, but can generate extraordinary results. This book follows that same philosophy. If you take the time to delve deeply and absorb the wealth of information offered, you will find instruction and inspiration in abundance." - Surface Design Journal

"This book is a significant and inspirational addition to the literature on natural dyeing and one which must be read by anyone interested in the topic." - Pam Borchardt, member of the Natural Dye Group, Plant Craft Cottage

From the Publisher