My recent obsession for natural dyeing has extended to buying natural dyeing books. I'm still leaving a lot to experimentation, chance and discovery but these books are the ones that taught me the basics.

India Flint is an Australian sheep farmer and artist who developed the eco-dyeing technique. She was inspired by the Easter eggs she dyed with onion skins every year with her Latvian grandmother. Eco-Dyeing: Botanical Dyes For Beautiful Textiles is a book filled with gorgeous pictures and many natural dyeing techniques including solar dyeing, shibori techniques, hapa-zome printing and cold bundling as well as eco-dyeing. The book also has a table listing the colours you can get from various plant parts - e.g. birch bark makes purples. 

Wild Colour: The Complete Guide to Making And Using Natural Dyes by Jenny Dean is a great book detailing all the different colours you can get from one dye simply by adding different mordants. The pictures in the book show the colour range you can get for each plant.

I adore Rebecca Desnos' beautiful pictures of her gorgeous naturally dyed fabrics. I was also curious to learn her soy mordant technique for cotton so I bought her book, Botanical Colour At Your Fingertips. Rebbeca is a vegan and only works with vegetable fibres such as cotton, banana and linen. She manages to dye these fibres in a range of beautiful colours simply by pre mordanting the fabric with soy milk.

If you're keen to know more about eco-dyeing I highly recommend these books. Have you got any great natural dyeing books I should read?