Natural Palettes

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 inspiration 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 the palettes with short essays that provide useful information. She connects the colors with particular landscapes, the restorative qualities of medicinal plants, common garden flora, lifestyle experiences, food and floral waste, and the ecological benefits of using organic materials to create colors. You may never view color---or your plants---the same way again.

PRAISE FOR NATURAL PALETTES...

"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

"The plant lover's alternative to the Pantone color guide."

– Julia Sherman, creator of Salad for President

"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

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.