Natural Dyes and Home Dyeing

About this title:

Here in a single volume is all the information you will need to extract dyestuffs from common trees, flowers, lichens, and weeds - all the information you need to create beautifully dyed materials after your own fancy, distinctive and individual.

The heart of this book is 52 recipes for dyes made from natural, easily obtained dyestuffs: brown dyes from the bark of apple, birch, hemlock, hickory and maple trees; yellows from a wide variety of sources such as arsement, white ash bark, barberry bark, sassafras, lichens, camomile flowers, and coffee beans; reds from madder, cochineal, Brazilwood and alkanet; blues from woad, chemic, orchil, and cudbear, as well as from popular indigo; blacks most commonly made from logwood and soot. There is also the possibility of combining any of these by top-dying (successive dyeing) - instructions for which you are given.

Each recipe gives you step-by-step instructions that tell you how to prepare your ingredients, how to shred, soak, dissolve and boil the materials you collect, how to prepare your cloth (whether cotton or wool) for dyeing, and exactly how long to boil it for optimum results.

Besides the 52 recipes, most of which are given in several versions, Miss Adrosko deepens your knowledge of dyeing techniques with a history of the craft before the discovery of America, among the colonists, and after 1850 when synthetic dyes began to be used. Appendixes list dyes mentioned in early dyers' manuals printed in America, and giver excerpts from three 19th-century treaties which reveal literally hundreds of sources for natural dyestuffs. Concisely, the dyes described in its pages, but will also give you the skills to make your own exciting discoveries in a field that has long been neglected."

Publisher : Dover Publications; Revised edition (June 1, 1971)
Language : English
Paperback : 176 pages
ISBN-10 : 0486226883
ISBN-13 : 978-0486226880
Item Weight : 6.8 ounces
Dimensions : 5.41 x 0.35 x 8.47 inches