Natural Palettes - by Sasha Duerr (Paperback)

About the Book

"An innovative plant-based color guide that includes twenty-five palettes with five hundred natural color swatches, providing inspiration for sustainable fashion, textiles, fine art, floral design, food, medicine, gardening, interior design, and other creative disciplines"--]cProvided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

"The plant-lover's alternative to the Pantone color guide."--Julia Sherman, creator of Salad for President

Renowned natural dyer, artist, and educator Sasha Duerr envisions a new age of fresh, modern color palettes, drawing from our original source of inspiration and ingredients--the natural world around us.

This innovative plant-based color guide includes twenty-five palettes with five hundred natural color swatches, providing a bounty of ideas for sustainable fashion, textiles, fine art, floral design, food, medicine, gardening, interior design, and other creative disciplines. Bring the healing power of forest bathing into your home with a palette of spruce cones, pine needles, and balsam branches. Move past Pantone and embrace the natural balance of a pollinator palette with Hopi sunflower, red poppy, echinacea, and scabiosa.

Duerr complements her palettes with illuminating reflections on connections between color and landscape, the healing properties of medicinal plants, the ways food and floral waste can be regenerated to enhance lifestyle experiences, the ecological benefits of using natural colors, and more. You may never view color--or the plants that surround us--the same way again.

Review Quotes

"Natural Palettes offers a swatch book of color stories from the world of natural dyes. It's a prime candidate for living on the coffee table: pages and pages of saturated paint-chip-style layouts draw you in while bitesize morsels of information keep you flipping for more. By removing talk of tools, process and project, Duerr manages to create a book that appeals to dyers across the entire spectrum of skill and experience. Both complete novices and experienced artisans can find themselves at the same table while exploring the inspiring potential of plants in this 400-plus-page tome.
- The Maine Organic Farmer and Gardener

"Presents an antidote to the exacting industry-standard Pantone swatch--one that's defined by biodiversity over industry trends, and embraces a circular approach to fashion, clothing, and food."
- The Slowdown

"A poem, a guide, a swatch book and a manifesto for natural color awareness rolled into one. This is a book steeped in the past, useful in the now, and alchemized for the future. A beautiful and crucial map for those looking for an adventure that begins at their feet."
- Jason Logan, author of Make Ink: A Forager's Guide to Natural Inkmaking

"Another great leap in Sasha Duerr's ongoing efforts to inform us of the extraordinary colors that can be achieved from flora, food, and plants. Whether you are looking to dye your own textiles or dive deeper into the ethnobotanical merits of a plant, Natural Palettes is a timely new color guide for a more sustainable way of living with nature."
- Sarah Lonsdale, cofounder of Remodelista and coauthor of Foraged Flora: A Year of Gathering and Arranging Wild Plants and Flowers

"In Natural Palettes, Sasha Duerr creates a true natural color guide from plants, which presents a real path past fast fashion and synthetic chemical dyes. This endlessly inspiring and holistic book shows us a creative and accessible way to embrace vibrant natural colors in our own lives for the health of the environment and for our own well-being."
- Jana Blankenship, founder of Captain Blankenship and author of Wild Beauty: Wisdom Recipes for Natural Self-Care

"Sasha Duerr shows us how to bring out the colors hidden in flowers, leaves, seeds and sometimes roots, and to combine them with sensitivity and sophistication. This kaleidoscope of peaceful, responsible color is useful not just in a fiber context. The palettes inspire grounded and tranquil creativity across all visual disciplines." -Keith Recker, Senior Consultant, Pantone Color Institute and author of True Colors: World Masters of Natural Dyes and Pigments

"The plant lover's alternative to the Pantone color guide."
- Julia Sherman, creator of Salad for President

"This volume offers poetic language, calming visuals and instructive texts. It is a manual and a destination for visual and creative inspiration, whilst inspiring readers to consider the wider impact of production and consumption."
- Aesthetica (UK)

"Color her happy: Authored by natural dyer, artist, and educator Sasha Duerr, this plant-based color-guide includes twenty-five palettes with 500 natural color swatches, providing inspiration for sustainable fashion, textiles, fine art, floral design, food, medicine, gardening, interior design, and other creative disciplines." - Veranda

"Sasha Duerr's new book is a natural dyes delight. It's filled with photographs and inspiration to explore and experiment with local flora. It is a book that challenges the dyer to think more broadly about their approach to dyeing and to continuously question and experiment with local plants."
- Turkey Red Journal

"[A] magnificent swatch book of 25 plant-based palettes containing 500 dyed fabric swatches backed up with short essays that explain the potential benefits of natural dyeing, making this a succinct and inspiring resource."
- Embroidery (UK)

"A variety of artisanal companies focusing on plant-based dyes have launched in the past five years, but Californian-based artist and designer Sasha Duerr has been immersed in natural dyes for 20 years, producing and exhibiting work, and also teaching regenerative practices for fashion and textiles. She's excited about the renaissance of creatives across the board, from fashion to interiors, using nontoxic colour. Here, she tells us about her methods...."
Elle Decoration (UK)

"In this gorgeous book, Sasha Duerr, pairs descriptions of plants with color swatches that illustrate the vibrant hues of dye that can be drawn from them. Passionfruit vines, orange peels, birch bark, various teas, and more complete Duerr's guide, which serves as both a reminder of the many uses of plants and a practical manifesto for artists working with chemical-free dyes."
- American Craft

About the Author

Sasha Duerr is an Oakland, California-based artist, designer, and professor at the California College of the Arts. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Martha Stewart Whole Living, Selvedge, and the Huffington Post. She is the author of Natural Color and The Handbook of Natural Plant Dyes.