Weekend Read: Dyeing Naturally by Emma Kylmälä
Reach into a hedgerow or a kitchen garden and pull out colour. Emma Kylmälä's new book is built on this conviction, and she makes it feel entirely within reach.
In an age when synthetic dyes dominate the textile industry, Dyeing Naturally arrives as both a practical manual and a timely recalibration. Kylmälä asks us to look closely at the world around us and rediscover what plant life has always offered: an extraordinary, ever-shifting palette reflecting season, soil, and place.
Cover of Dyeing Naturally by Emma Kylmälä
Kylmälä is a Finnish natural dyer and theatre costumier based in London. Her dual life, spanning the folkloric foraging traditions of the Finnish countryside and the resourceful creativity of urban making, gives this book its particular richness. She grew up gathering berries and mushrooms with her grandparents, and that same attentiveness to what nature freely offers runs through every page. For Kylmälä, dyeing is a way of moving through the world as much as a technical practice.
What distinguishes Dyeing Naturally from a crowded shelf of craft titles is its refusal to trade accessibility for depth. Kylmälä demystifies the dye pot with characteristic warmth. "If you can brew yourself some tea, you can steep colours from plants," she writes, and the book holds to that spirit throughout, guiding readers through foraging and identifying plants, dyeing, mordanting, and the long-term care of plant-dyed fibres with genuine rigour. These are usable, transferable techniques, grounded in years of practice. Her background in theatre costume adds another layer of authority: knowing how colour reads, performs, and endures under pressure is a different discipline from domestic dyeing, and it shows.
Japanese Indigo dyed fabrics and fibres. "Dyeing with Japanese Indigo in a small space has it's challenges, but it's not impossible", writes Kylmälä.
The scope is admirably broad, yet entirely accessible. Seasonal dye plant profiles sit alongside responsible foraging guidance, making the book as relevant for the city dweller cultivating a pot of weld on a balcony as for someone with a sprawling rural garden. A bonus knitting pattern by Sari Nordlund anchors the book firmly within the wider textile making community, a reminder that natural dyeing feeds directly into how we dress, furnish, and inhabit our lives.
Petals scattered, fibres gathered: the bundle dyeing process across yarn and silk, with marigold, tansy and dahlia doing the work of colour.
The photography is earthy and atmospheric, entirely in keeping with the subject. Crucially, the colours shown are honest — no two skeins identical, no result perfectly predictable. Variation is presented not as a flaw to be managed but as one of natural dyeing's greatest gifts, an argument the book makes elegantly and without sentimentality.
Published by Cozy Publishing, Dyeing Naturally runs to 200 hardcover pages and earns its place as a lasting reference. Return to it with every changing season.
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Further Information:
Dyeing Naturally by Emma Kylmälä, published by Cozy Publishing, is now available to order from the Selvedge Bookshop.
Read more about the world of natural dyes in our current publication: Selvedge Issue 130, Flower.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Marigolds from Emma Kylmälä's garden, as featured in "Stories from a Slow Summer", a post on her Substack page, Dyeing Naturally. Courtesy of Emma Kylmälä.
All further images courtesy of Emma Kylmälä and Cozy Publishing.