Customer Reviews

The Dyer's Companion (The Companion Series)

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Any crafter who works with fibers and fabric and is interested in custom dye work will consider this little spiral-bound book an essential reference packing in everything from dyeing recipes to disposal advice and a color section of color-graduated yarn samples. The Dyer's Companion is no mere 'how to tye dye' craft book, but a serious fabric artist's guide to working with color in diverse materials.

From indigo to synthetic vat dyes, the procedures, safety precautions and methods to create your own beautifully custom colored yarns is in this small but power-packed spiral manual. I myself had prepared an indigo bath once, and enjoyed watching the slightly yellow bath turn greenish yarn startlingly blue-jeans blue when shaken in air (Utterly fascinating. If you teach school chemistry or home school, this manual could be a semester of science work.)

Everything is included here, from equipment to recipes to weights and measures. In addition are suggestions on how to keep records (important if you want to reproduce anything again, and a full color section of yarn swatches.)

Dyeing is fun, whether you use Kool-Aid food dye or prepare natural materials like barks, roots or berries. But there are safety measures to heed, so I recommend this book as an essential if you want to undertake this art in your fiber work.

I was a brand new dyer when I got this book. It's full of great information, and has lots of math and precise measurements for all types of dyeing. As a beginner, I was a little overwhelmed by the amount of information, and didn't really need 2/3 of what was in it. But now that I'm a little more advanced, I really appreciate the different sections on different types of dye and how they react differently. There is a great section on color in the back, as well as conversion charts that I use ALL the time. It really is a companion book, and not one to teach in detail about one particular dye method, but great to have for quick reference.

This book is great to use while you are right in the middle of dyeing -- it provides a quick flip-book reminder of proportions, weights, processes, times, etc for various methods of fiber dying. The book has no color illustrations, history of dying, but it does give explicit step-by-step instructions for the processes of natural and synthetic dyeing and discharging color. I appreciated the author's chart of fibers and how to figure out what kind of fiber you are dyeing by the way that a thread burns (I often buy mystery fabric for the purpose of dyeing to get a desired color and the book saved me from making a serious mistake in choosing between acid or reactive dyes). If you are actually dyeing fabric, know something about what you want to do but are not all that familiar with the actual process, buy this book.