Eco Colour: Botanical Dyes for Beautiful Textiles - Hardcover

Flint, India

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1596683309 ISBN 13: 9781596683303

Publisher: Krause Craft, 2010

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* One of the most elegantly designed crafts books to debut this year, with a sophisticated layout and color photographs that capture well the ecological sensitivities of the artist. Though the art of dyeing has long been associated with natural materials, South Australian first-time author (and creator of hand-made “slow” fashion) Flint maximizes the use of renewable resources while minimizing most harmful footprints. On occasion, she goes to extremes, justifying, for instance, the use of wood to heat boiling-dye waters. Yet there’s much valuable information on every page, in every illustration, throughout each chapter; the author’s very careful orientation to the subject, beginning with collecting plants and finishing with special effects and fabric care and feeding, educates and energizes. Notes about history and practical applications (say, the production of indigo and the creation of natural blues through woad plants) are balanced with charts of traditional dye materials and specific details about processing, including plant oddities such as eucalyptus and St. John’s wort, different effects froma range of techniques (for instance, hapa-zome, or beating color into cloth, as well as the familiar resist )and mordants (the stuff that fixes or makes color permanent). Urban apartment dwellers might be a bit challenged by the philosophy and processes; and a few materials indigenous to Australia are unavailable to those on other continents. Nonetheless, an excellent source. --Barbara Jacobs

Edition details

• Publisher: Krause Craft
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1596683309
• ISBN 13: 9781596683303
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 240