Eco Colour

by Flint, India

• ISBN13: 9781596683303
• ISBN10: 1596683309
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-09-14
• Publisher: Interweave Pr

Summary

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. InEco 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 Colourinspires both the home dyer and textile professional seeking to extend their skills using India's successful methods.

Author Biography

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, and ecologically sustainable plant-based printing process giving brilliant color to cloth. Flint has been working with plant dyes for more than 20 years and she has artwork in a myriad of collections and museums in Australia, Latvia, and Germany. She produces and sporadically exhibits a range of hand-worked salvage clothing under the label ‘prophet of bloom’, as well as designing and making plant-dyed costumes for theater and dance. She currently lives in South Australia.

Table of Contents

Prologue

What this book is for

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

The Workspace

Equipment and a place to work

Equipment

Storing samples

On the Road

Harvesting and storing plants for dyeing

Safe practices

Natural Dyestuffs

Some traditional dye materials

The edible dye garden

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

Some Special Dyeplant Groups

Eucalyptus dyes

Beyond the eucalyptus

Ice-flower dyes

Process

Variations

Plants to try

Fruits and berries

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

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

References

Further reading

Websites

Index

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.