Tired of the limited choice given when choosing cloth for your next project, or even when perusing the commercial dyes available? Why not make your own dyes from natural materials, just like people have been doing for thousands of years?

This was the way of dyeing all cloth until late Victorian times, and in these days when anything "back to nature" is popular it is once again an option. There are a lot of words in here and far fewer pictures than is usual for Search Press, but it is a big subject and needs plenty of space for discussion. I won’t go into the technical details here, but the book certainly does, and when I actually sat down to read it I was impressed by the fact that it is not as obscure as I thought. Ms Dean explains it all rather well, from safety tips to mordanting, cleaning the fibers if you are really going all the way with real fleeces, etc. to testing for fastness. My tip is to sit down and just read it all before you actually do anything, absorbing all the new and unfamiliar information like cloth does a dye. I particularly liked the back section on making dye recipes, where the page edges are color coded for ease of use and the colors each recipe would produce on white cloth are shown. At the very back, along with a useful index, are further lists of plants you can use and the colors they produce, and a bibliography. For a small format book costing under £10 (or $20) this is quite an exhaustive volume.