A translation and facsimile reproduction of a unique 18th century French manuscript that provides colour recipes and samples for producing dyes for the textiles of the day. With analysis and essays setting it in context.

If you want to give fabrics that personal touch, you can't do without this vital tool that covers everything from traditional vat coloring to tie-dying, as well as innovative contemporary methods involving photocopiers, foil, and latex. Jam-packed with handy tips from a leading expert in textile dyeing and decoration, it describes the characteristics of different fabrics and yarns, dyes, pigments, and paints. Color strip, screen or block print, do Indonesian batik, smoke stencil, and so much more, with over 100 inspirational, beautifully photographed recipes for dyeing and patterning fabric, a comprehensive techniques section, and symbols that quickly convey a recipe's difficulty, preparation time, process, and type of dye required. And a handy color key system instantly identifies the best material for each procedure!

An explanation of the plants to grow for fabric dyes, how to care for them, and how to make dyes.

Beginning with studio practices and safety rules, this information-packed handbook is appropriate for both newcomers and experienced dyers but assumes that readers have a serious interest in textile design. An overview of dyeing starts with fibers and fabrics and discusses all aspects of the dyes favored by textile studios--fiber reactive, acid, vat, and disperse--before explaining discharging, screen printing, monoprinting, stamping, stenciling, resist dyeing, devore, and painting. Would-be fabric artists are advised along the way to identify a personal approach to dyeing--free spirit? rule-follower?--and color photographs of work by today's top fiber artists elucidate prevailing styles. Recipes and techniques are accompanied by step-by-step instructions with photographs, and a concealed spiral binding allows the book to lie flat. Ten appendices include a worksheet for recording chemicals, procedures, and costs for all projects; a guide to washing fabric; descriptions of stock solutions, thickeners, and steaming; a metric conversion table; and a guide to water temperatures.

Persian blue, pomegranate flower, spiny lobster, wine soup, pale flesh, dove breast, golden wax, grass green, green sand, rotten olive, modest plum, agate, rich French gray, gunpowder of the English……..just some of the color names of old fabric to fire the imagination. Memoirs on Dyeing concerns a unique manuscript from the eighteenth century; a dyers memoirs from Languedoc, containing recipes for dyes with corresponding color samples. It is an exceptional document, hugely rare and of great significance not only to textile historians but dyers and colorists today, as thanks to the information in the manuscript the colors can be reproduced exactly, with the same ingredients, or reproduced using modern techniques by matching the color samples. To the English translation of the text, together with facsimile pages reproduced in color from the original manuscript, are added essays meant to situate it in its historical, economic and technological contexts. For those historians who have long been fascinated by the change in scale and the amount of innovation that occurred in woollen cloth production in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries, the Memoirs on Dyeing bring firsthand insight into the daily preoccupations and tasks of a key actor in the success story of the Languedocian broadcloth production specially devised for export to the Levant. Even non-specialists may be interested in understanding the clever management and technical organization that made it possible for the author to produce, dye, finish, pack and export up to 1,375 pieces of superfine broadcloth per year, representing nearly 51 km of cloth.

The comprehensive recipe section gives instructions for over 100 colours, using both traditional dyes such as cochineal, indigo, madder and weld, and dyes from more common plants such as blackberry, rhubarb, oak and walnut.