Fibershed + Seelie Studio
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Get 100 bonus points on purchases over $300 ❋ Sitewide Summer Sale ❋ Use code SUMMER30 for up to 30% off ❋
By Sasha Duerr, instructor of our Sea to Soil: Seaweed Color Study Workshop
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.
“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
Sasha Duerr
Sasha Duerr is an Oakland, California-based artist, designer, and previously a 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 also the author of Natural Color and The Handbook of Natural Plant Dyes.
Edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua, inspiration behind the Sea to Soil Series
Not Too Late is the book for anyone who is despondent, anxious, or unsure about climate change and seeking answers. As the contributors to this volume make clear, the future will be decided by whether we act in the present—and we must act to counter institutional inertia, fossil fuel interests, and political obduracy.
Contributors include Julian Aguon, Jade Begay, adrienne maree brown, Edward Carr, Renato Redantor Constantino, Joelle Gergis, Jacquelyn Gill, Mary Annaise Heglar, Mary Anne Hitt, Roshi Joan Halifax, Nikayla Jefferson, Antonia Juhasz, Kathy Jetnil Kijiner, Fenton Lutunatabua & Joseph Sikulu, Yotam Marom, Denali Nalamalapu, Leah Stokes, Farhana Sultana, and Gloria Walton
Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than 25 books, including Orwell’s Roses, Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A longtime climate and human rights activist, she serves on the boards of Oil Change International and Third Act.
Her newsletter of essays and analyses can be found at meditationsinanemergency.com.
Thelma Young Lutunatabua is a digital storyteller and activist. She is the co-founder of Not Too Late. She currently works at The Solutions Project. Before that, she worked in various roles supporting the global climate movement, as well as other human rights endeavors around the world.
Written by Josie Iselin, illustrated by Ellen Litwiller; presenters during our Sea to Soil Series
A mesmerizing tour of our underwater forests and what they can teach us.
Offshore and out of sight to most beachgoers on the North Pacific coast is a wondrous habitat: the bull kelp forest. Each year, tiny bull kelp saplings explode into sixty-foot “redwoods,” until winter storms tear them loose and fling great tangles of wrack on the shore. While they flourish, these underwater forests harbor abalone, salmon, and rockfish, and they entreat cormorants and murrelets to hunt among their thrumming canopies. Meanwhile, fluffy-furred otters and pizza-sized sea stars gorge on spiny urchins who, if left to run rampant, will devour a kelp bed down to barren wasteland. In The Mysterious World of the Bull Kelp Forest, Josie Iselin profiles thirteen species—with stylish illustrations from Ellen Litwiller—to be our ambassadors to this undersung world. She explores how their interspecies dramas play out in eight coastal regions, from Alaska to central California, exploring instances of interdependent, compromised, and resilient coastal ecosystems. An array of sea creatures feature in these pages, as well as shorebirds that connect land and sea. Land-dwelling humans are also deeply implicated in this saga—by turns beneficiaries, agents of harm, and stewards of these subtidal sanctuaries.
Josie Iselin, author
Josie Iselin is an artist, author, and designer who has been telling seaweed and kelp stories for over a decade. Her two books An Ocean Garden: The Secret Life of Seaweed (2014, 2023) and The Curious World of Seaweed (2019) display her profound understanding of seaweed natural history and her deep connections within the seaweed science community. Iselin directs content development for the Above/Below campaign and is the lead author of the campaign’s web story, The Mysterious World of Bull Kelp (bullkelp.info). She teaches in the School of Design at San Francisco State University and lives in San Francisco. josieiselin.com
Ellen Litwiller, illustrator
Ellen Litwiller is a freelance illustrator whose work brings art and science together in imaginative ways. She loves exploring how creativity and curiosity intersect, using a variety of mediums to tell stories that are both visually striking and scientifically accurate. She began her career creating exhibits for natural history museums, where she worked as a muralist, illustrator, model maker, and preparator. With years of hands-on experience in exhibition design and installation, she developed a deep appreciation for detail and storytelling. Through collaboration with scientists, she enjoys the shared curiosity that unite art and science—both rooted in observation and appreciation of the world around us and the universe beyond.
By Rebecca Burgess, Executive Director of Fibershed
Master dyer Rebecca Burgess identifies 36 plants that will yield beautiful natural shades and shows how easy it is to make the dyes. Pokeweed produces a vibrant magenta, while a range of soft lavender shades comes from elderberries; indigo yields a bright blue, and coyote brush creates stunning sunny yellows.
Harvesting Color explains where to find these plants in the wild (and for those that can be grown in your backyard, how to nurture them) and the best time and way to harvest them; maps show the range of each plant in the United States and Canada. For the dyeing itself, Burgess describes the simple equipment needed and provides a master dye recipe. The book is organized seasonally; as a bonus, each section contains a knitting project using wools colored with dyes from plants harvested during that time of the year. With breathtaking color photographs by Paige Green throughout, Harvesting Color is an essential guide to this growing field, for crafters and DIYers; for ecologists and botanists; and for artists, textile designers, and art students.
Sand CollectionNatural Textures
About the CollectionRooted in earthy tones and natural texture, this vase draws the eye with its layered surface and sculptural presence. Its generous shape makes it ideal for statement arrangements—or as a work of art all its own.
