With clothes, as with vegetables, the end product is often presented in a manner detached from its origins and it’s too easy to forget that everything we eat, consume and wear comes from nature. If the initial age verification is unsuccessful, we will contact you asking you to provide further information to prove that you are aged 18 or over. Like most recipe books, the recipes are a little hit-and-miss, but the majority of recipes in this are actually really good, which surprised me - a lot of vegan cookbooks pair the strangest ingredients and make really conflicting meals, but for the most part, the recipes here were unusual but really delicious.

The exciting part is the content itself is very practical and useful, conveying a number of useful techniques across each area. I was inspired by Bella's unique proposal for growing, cooking, and making clothes in an elevated and stylish way. Swap food waste and fast fashion for homegrown produce, delicious vegan dishes, and a contemporary capsule wardrobe with the help of Bella's friendly, accessible approach to sustainable living. However, it is challenging to live that way or even do the whole process of the book in just one season. I was expecting a link to download the patterns but instead there is a map to the pattern sheets, which is useless if you cannot download the patterns.Overall this is a really wonderful little book and a great introduction to vegan cooking, fabric dying and clothes-making. Right now, the book offers a very feasible experience that does not involve growing plants to extract fiber, dyeing those and then weaving them into a fabric. The aim here isn’t for readers to grow all of their vegetables, hand make all clothes, or even convert to a strict vegan diet. Also used in food processing, alum is not poisonous in small quantities and it is a natural mineral.

Not only can we use this rubbish to create new plant life, but the fact that it nourishes insects and grows more food is inspiring. Once you’ve mastered dying your own fabrics, you can then transform those fabrics into exclusively designed pieces of clothing (including a shirt dress and a duster coat) using Bella’s five full-size pattern sheets.The book will guide you through every step of the process; you will learn not only how to forage, sow, harvest, and cook their own fruits and vegetables, but also how to use your homegrown produce to create natural dyes. BG: Demystifying and personalizing circularity is one of the key objectives of this book, and for that, there is no better place to start than the soil. The reason recipes are included in the book is to show people a tentative spectrum of colors they can achieve. Five crops; blackberry, cabbage, nettle, onion and rhubarb play leading roles in this book by Bella Gonshorovitz, as they carry the reader through each step or process: grow, cook, dye, wear.

We now know that having a plant-based diet is one of the most beneficial things one can do for the environment in terms of personal behavior. The first step is hunting, growing or foraging for produce, then there’s cooking with five vegan or plant-based recipes.

Whether you choose to grow your own food or not, the recipes, tips, and sewing patterns in this book are guaranteed to inspire and delight. Rhubarb is a zero waste plant – dye with the roots and eat the stalks; the leaves are poisonous but powerful mordants to prepare fabric for dyeing. I made the onion dyed dress from upcycled fabrics for myself, showed it to my agent – who helped me put together a proposal. I also found some extremely useful tips and clear explanations even as someone who is not very familiar with many of the concepts or techniques in the book.

Perfect for: Crafty, sustainability-minded readers who enjoy making things with their own hands, and anyone who wants to understand more about the processes behind the items we consume on a daily basis. Modifiers are interesting because when you dye something, it is very rare to get two identical results.The common phenomena now is that people wear things once and then throw it away, particularly in the UK. I always feel that everything can continually be more sustainable but nothing is ever truly sustainable. Even as a professional fashion designer, most of the clothes I wear are made by me, but not all of them. Much like the cooking scraps I add to my compost heap, horse droppings are usually considered to be the ultimate end of a cycle – waste generated as a by-product of extracting nutrients from food consumed by humans and animals. Each chapter focuses on one crop from sowing, cultivating and harvesting, to several delicious recipes, to notes on dying with examples of the range of colours that can be achieved.