Eco Colour: Botanical Dyes for Beautiful Textiles [Hardcover]

India Flint (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 14, 2010

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.

Editorial Reviews

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

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.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Interweave Press (September 14, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596683309
• ISBN-13: 978-1596683303
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 9.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #92,685 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ecological Delights, October 20, 2010

By 

C. Reed "Spinning Teacher" (Richland, WA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Eco Colour: Botanical Dyes for Beautiful Textiles (Hardcover)

This book has made me take a second look at botanical dyes. This is not a recipe book. Ms. Flint opens up your eyes to all of the dye stuffs in your neighborhood. Like the slow food movement, she advises getting dyestuff close to home. She shares basic principals for getting the color out of common plants. She describes ways to fix color to silk, wool and cellulose fabrics and spinning fibers. She cuts out the nasty metallic salts as mordants by adding time and not always using heat. Her plants and dyes need to cure or age with the cloth. What that means is that a few minutes are spent applying the color and then you set the cloth aside for days or even months before you finish the process. This could work quite well in my busy life. Her philosophy is captured in one of her tips about hapazome, beating plants on cloth to color them. This technique is not as colorfast as the other techniques. But she tells us to embrace this. Decorate a garment in the spring with those flowers and leaves. As the design fades, add to it with summer blossoms and refresh the fabric again in the fall for an ever-changing fabric.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lush, practical, October 25, 2010

By 

Margaret Kennedy - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Eco Colour: Botanical Dyes for Beautiful Textiles (Hardcover)

Impressed with the cover I ordered Eco Colour at Amazon. Australia based India Flint is obviously a gifted textile artist and colorist. This is a lushly beautiful book you can spend hours pouring through, but it is also a practical guide to natural dye for fabric, wool yarn and sliver with an emphasis on safety.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful book design....., April 18, 2011

By 

A fellow traveller (Keene, NH) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Eco Colour: Botanical Dyes for Beautiful Textiles (Hardcover)

I agree with what all the reviewers have said about the presentation of these crafts. The concepts behind the book as well are what intrigued me to want to purchase this title. The colors that are actually accomplished and the products themselves are severely disappointing. Although initially interesting, page after page after page begins to look like an expose of the Shroud of Turin. Or coffee stains that refuse to wash out of your favorite blouse. Or your pants knees after gardening. I so wanted to love this book. Back to the dyepot.....