5 best natural dye books

Last month I wrote about the 5 best natural dyes that were identified at the 10ISS conference in Oaxaca. Here's the five best natural dye books that address the chemistry, sustainability, and beauty of plant and insect dyes, suggested at a panel discussion of experienced dyers:

1. Jim Liles, the Art and Craft of Natural Dyeing, Traditional Recipes for Modern Use.

2. Jenny Dean, Wild Color.

3. Jo Kirby, Natural Dyes

4. Diane Epp, The Chemistry of Natural Dyes.

5. Dominique Cardon, Natural Dyes

*Note that this list does not include any references to Eco-printing, a technique that infuses materials with pigments from plant materials. The above list refers to natural dyes that are used for coloring yarns and yardage.

In addition, I'd like to add here some other resources for anyone interested in natural dyes:

1. Catharine Ellis' blog. She is our guru of North American natural dyes. Catharine teaches and travels internationally in order to gather as much information as she can, and is eager to share.

2. Michel Garcia'sworkshops and instructional videos

3. Turkey Red Journal

140 days: into the dark

This entry is dedicated to Ben, a young man who committed suicide in our community last week.

I picked up a book today, Oaxaca, Stories in Cloth, and in the forward Martín Prechtel writes,

"Great artists, on the other hand, make gifts, gifts of grief-derived beauty to liberate, infuse, and above all nourish, not themselves, but what they love."

I've thought a lot about what I want this project to say. I've explored how the text and handkerchiefs interact. I've considered including personal stories, or texts by well-known writers. I've thought about what parallels I can make between indigo and MDE.

Now I know that I must move this project forward with passion and love for life itself. So that this awful thing becomes visible, and to teach people to see it as a condition, not characteristic. No one would choose to be depressed, just as no one wants cancer.

I have an indigo vat that I let go dormant for the winter. The indigo is revived; liberated from its frozen hibernation, nourished, and ready infuse the cloth with living blue fluid. Tomorrow I will dip more handkerchiefs into the darkness...for Ben.

140 days: Stories and Statistics

How do we talk about depression, and what are the different impacts of subjective and objective information?  My work often explores language, particularly ambiguous texts that can apply to several contexts and many individual interpretations. In this project, I compare broad, hard facts with highly personal emotional responses in order to make the condition as real as possible.

In his opinion article, John Allen Paulos comments, "I’ll close with perhaps the most fundamental tension between stories and statistics. The focus of stories is on individual people rather than averages, on motives rather than movements, on point of view rather than the view from nowhere, context rather than raw data. Moreover, stories are open-ended and metaphorical rather than determinate and literal."

The passages I will use in this project will demonstrate the need for both empirical evidence and factual data when talking about Major Depressive Disorder. For those who have not experienced depression personally, clinical descriptions and statistics can begin to uncover and validate this silent disorder. For those who already know what it feels like, the literary texts describe what is so often hard to explain to others. Together, the words and the indigo-dyed handkerchiefs will hopefully make the pain and suffering that is experienced with MDD more visible and less stigmatized.