(Bilingual edition – French & English)

This book is for you if:

• You’re seeking new sources of inspiration for your creative work—professional or personal. Here you’ll discover 157 rare, original, and historically authentic colors, ready to spark new, beautiful, and lasting creations.

• You love and practice natural and botanical dyeing. This book will become your working notebook, providing the colorimetric characteristics of each shade.

• You care about ancestral know-how and wish to understand, preserve, and share it. This book is a heritage treasure, reviving centuries-old knowledge for today’s makers.

This is a book I personally highly recommend and work from, in my workshops and my daily dye-works. 

About the Book

This bilingual French-English edition reproduces, for the first time in full, all the dyed wool cloth samples found in the 18th-century manuscript “Mémoires de teinture”, completed around 1763 by Paul Gout, master dyer and director of the Royal Wool Cloth Manufacture of Bize in Languedoc.

At its peak, this important manufactory exported over 2,700 pieces of fine wool cloth—more than 52 kilometers of fabric—toward the Levantine trade routes, dyed in grand teint colors renowned for their brilliance and resistance to light and washing.

Dyers’ sample manuscripts are invaluable records. They trace the evolution of dyeing arts and color naming across Europe during the two centuries preceding the advent of synthetic dyes. Today, they offer a rich and eco-conscious source of inspiration for contemporary textile and fashion creators.

The Authors

Dominique Cardon, one of the world’s foremost experts on natural dyes, brings new life to this forgotten 18th-century dyer’s notebook, translating its technical recipes and 157 shades such as fleur de grenade (pomegranate flower), écarlate de feu (fire scarlet), vert de mer (sea green), and chamois.

She co-authors this work with Iris Brémaud, CNRS researcher, continuing a shared mission to revive traditional dyeing knowledge for modern practice.

Details

• 152 pages, 170 × 240 mm

• Published: January 2023

• ISBN 979-10-699-9896-4

• Bilingual French / English