File this one in the "New To Me" category; this book was published in 1995. Late last summer I bought it at the bookstore and read through it casually. I was attracted by its beautiful section in the back of the book, with pictures of swatches of various yarns dyed with the plant combined with different mordants. I have a garden in my back yard where I grow mostly vegetables for our consumption, but have long wanted to try growing some dye plants.
At the moment I am strictly a non-natural-dye dyer, but the thought of growing my own dye plants is appealing to me, especially framed by the back to the earth conversation I see happening everywhere I look.
This winter, as I gathered my notes, drew up plans, and made the list of the seeds I was going to order for our vegetable garden this coming summer, I took A Dyer's Garden out again to figure out what would be a good plant to start with. I need to start slow, as I know from experience I tend to get overwhelmed if I jump in with both feet. Again I turned to the back pages with the rainbow of swatch pictures, and looked through all the descriptions of the plants, their growing needs, and how they are processed to dye fiber. This section is truly excellent in the depth it examines each plant. You get a lot of information crammed into two pages devoted to each plant.
After looking through all the plants listed, I decided on Black-eyed Susan. They'll be pretty as well as useful. What I especially like is I can collect the plant parts and flowers and save them for later. Many dye plants you have to use right away, and I know I'm not going to be able to do that reliably, so I need to be able to save the plants up.
I also found myself drawn to the indigo-bearing plants, so I turned to the section on how to dye with plants, in the middle of the book. This section is great. Indigo dyes are processed in a totally different way than the others, so that part is set off at the end. After reading through it, I realized it was a process that was way over my head at the moment and I crossed those plants off my list. (Sometimes, finding out what you don't want to do is just as important as what you do. And apropos of which, there is a super helpful "plants not to grow" section in this book.)
One great tip that the author offered, about the timing of mordanting, completely set my mind at ease about trying to use plant-based dyes. I kept thinking how many steps there are when you add in the mordanting before everything else, and that seemed to make this a prohibitively work intensive method. But she points out that you can do your mordanting all at once, in a separate step, and store the yarn/fiber pre-mordanted, rather than having to do it at the same time as you are doing your dyeing. She also offers some terrific and "green" tips for disposing of many mordants; I had always heard that the mordants are the most dangerous part of natural dyeing (and some really are), which had put me off it as well. Rather than give away those tips, I'll let you find them out for yourself in the book.
This is not an exhaustive resource for dyeing plants; in my seed catalog I found dozens of additional plants for sale for dyeing. It is more aimed at newcomers to the craft, and as such is very encouraging and gentle. The book starts with a FAQ, for heaven's sake!
This quote sums up the style and attitude of the book: "If you follow my general directions, I'm sure that your colors will be pretty and you'll have a lot of fun." Highly recommended!
No comments:
Post a Comment