Natural Dyeing/Jackie Crook

Natural Dyeing by Jackie Crook; 112 pages

I picked this up because I've been perusing The Dyer's Garden by Rita Buchanan and wanted some more information on using plant-based dyes at home. This book was a mixed bag: it has some good tables for calculating your own dye batches, and some good general advice on mordanting and cleaning your yarn. The photography is also wonderful, even if it overwhelms the text in a few places. However, most of the plants Crook talks about are exotic species from Europe or the tropics and she includes no information on how to obtain them (I don't think Michael's carries "powered bark of brazilwood"). The final straw was when she described the fruit of an osage orange/hedgeapple tree as, well, orange; I flipped to her bio and saw that she's located in the UK, which explains the lack of North American plants. Turns out the things she describes as abundant, like gorse and ivy, are also European species (which I saw when I finally looked up the Latin names). I can see this book being useful, but it definitely needs to be paired with another book (or lots of googling) to be able to use the dyes described here.