Books: Dye Plants of Ontario by Nancy J. McGuffin

I was checking out some books in the library, to see whether I am going to buy them or not, and stumbled upon this one, which I won’t get, but it might be of interest to someone else. There is a fairly good collection of books on natural dyes in the library at the Royal Ontario Museum (and here I didn’t even know they had a library!), so this is where I went on a book scouting trip last week.

Here’s the table of contents:They teamed up and tested all the recipes that are provided (on textiles, of course). What is nice about this book is that every recipe comes with a sketch of the plant. Here is bloodroot, one of the traditional East coast North American plants that is supposed to give colors within the red range (hence the name if the plant):

The recipes do not mention lightfastness at all, which for me is a significant downside, but the sketches are nice.