Natural Dyes and Home Dyeing (formerly Titled: Natural Dyes in the United States)

Front Cover
Courier Corporation, Jan 1, 1971 - Crafts & Hobbies - 154 pages
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 fifty-two 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 arsemart, 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 the popular indigo; and blacks most commonly made from logwood and soot. There is also the possibility of combining any of these by top-dyeing (successive dyeing) ? instructions for which 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 wood) for dyeing, and exactly how long to boil it for optimum results.
Besides theÿfifty-two 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 give excerpts from three 19th-century treatises which reveal literally hundreds of sources for natural dyestuffs. Concisely written, well organized, this book will not only let you make all 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.
 

Selected pages

Contents

Historical background
3
Blue Dyes
13
Red Dyes
20
Yellow Dyes
31
Brown Dyes
39
Purple Dyes
43
Black Dyes
45
Neutral Dyes
47
Dye recipes
69
Topdyeing
107
Bibliography
110
Common names of some chemicals used in dyeing
118
Dyes Occasionally Mentioned in Dyers Manuals Printed in America
120
Excerpt from David Ramsay The history of SouthCarolina Charleston David Longworth l809 2 vol vol 2 pp 249252
121
Excerpt from Thomas Cooper A practical treatise on dyeing and callicoe fainting Philadelphia Thomas Dobson l8l5 pp 483506
123
Recipes for dyeing woolen taken from Molonys 1833 dye manual
140

Dyeing With Natural Dyes Revised
55
Working with color
57
Planning a home dyeing project
64

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