Eco Colour: Botanical dyes for beautiful textiles by India Flint, Available from Artisan Books

India Flint is a works with textiles and natural dyes to create objects of beauty, with Eco Colour providing a tome for others with an aim of providing the least harm to the dyer, the end user of the object, and the environment.

This is an excellent book - it gets you thinking about the options that we have for producing and consuming textiles without synthetic and often highly dangerous materials.

While native plants to Australia feature, her advice could work anywhere in the world. She’s given instructions as to how to dye in any country with what you have, and provides examples of the dyeing traditions that occur, such as dyeing with soy in Japan. Eco Colour covers dyeing sources, health, safety and equipment, preparing, processing and applying dyes along with traditional and more unusual methods of dyeing such as slow cold dyeing fabric by composting, and dyeing cloth with frozen flowers.

Methods used might be cringe inducing for some - people use bleach on their clothing without a second thought, however using stored urine to assist with dyeing or screenprinting with animal manure could be drawing the line. There’s a wonderful underlying delight in the chance chaos that might happen using the processes - you’re dealing with nature here, and there’s no guarantees. Unlike many dyeing books, there’s projects here which are kid friendly, and gives us all the opportunity to learn more about how we can use the resources around us.

The book has been stunningly and thoughtfully designed with environmentally friendly materials, which over time you may well be gifting to a friend as a coffee table book, complete with your experiments with coffee grounds dyeing the pages.

About the reviewer: Kylie Gusset resides in Australia and is passionate about knitting, handcraft and eco crafting issues.

More: India Flint invites dyers working with Australian indigenous plants to participate in a new national investigative dye project. Rather than one person working in isolation, nibbling away at the metaphorical iceberg; it is hoped this project will embrace the work of many participants. Working with a uniform recording method and data sample sheet and using digital reproduction methods it should be possible to collate a wealth of information for future publication. Samples will be uploaded to Tincturia Australis Blog.

Great idea. Link, via.

knit-r-done posted a link on the ‘what are you making‘ forum thread to her embroidery ‘internal organs’ experiment.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my perceptions of my body. I still plan on doing a lot of knitting, but I’m going to be working a lot of stuff out in my head with embroidery for a while. I’m thinking beyond “body image” to the mental pictures I carry with me of my own inner workings–bones, organ, chemicals.