A Dyer's Garden: From Plant to Pot Growing Dyes for Natural Fibers

A Dyer's Garden: From Plant to Pot Growing Dyes for Natural Fibers A Dyer's Garden touches on the history and nature of dye plants and walks you through a garden season from design to planting to harvesting for the dyepot.
Customer Review: Great for anyone new to dyeing!
This was my first introduction to the world of dyeing with plants. The photography is terrific and gives you a good idea of what you'll get from each plant. Mordants are discussed, and the plants that are included are covered thoroughly for both cultivation and dye recipes. My only regret? That I can't find the seeds for the Japanese Indigo! I recommended this book to several people when we attended our local fiber festival.
Customer Review: Beautiful, well-organized guide to dye plants
This book focuses mainly on the home growing and use of dye plants. There is even a section devoted to the layout of the home dye garden. General mordanting and dye bath info is given at the beginning of the book. In the "Portfolio of Dye Plants" which follows, two pages are devoted to each dye plant. For each plant, 4-10 color photos illustrate the results obtained with various mordants on different fibers. The instructions for using different plants are not in traditional recipe form. Instead, Buchanan indicates how much plant material is generally required for a given amount of fiber ("flowers from 8 plants," etc). This fits in with Buchanan's emphasis on diversity of color over reproducibility, but it could be troublesome for users of purchased dyestuffs. In short, this book is nice to look at, easy to use, and appears to contain highly useful information for dyer/gardeners.