Grow, Cook, Dye, Wear: From Seed to Style the Sustainable Way

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Bella: I started my own made-to-measure studio - reluctantly at first, because I didn’t want to let go of design and fashion, as I perceived it then, and become only a dressmaker. However, once I started doing it, it solved a lot of problems I had thought of as ethical but which were actually sustainability issues. Transform your fabrics into five exclusively designed, essential pieces, including a shirt dress and duster coat.

I encourage readers to approach the book at their own pace. Maybe you’ll just grow onions and make recipes, maybe you’ll save skins from store bought onions when you cook the recipes and dye fabrics or maybe you’ll just upcycle fabric and make your own dress using the patterns. The whole process is slow in itself. You start with the onion, perhaps in spring and harvest in autumn, cook with it, collect enough skins to dye the fabric and make the dress over winter so it’s ready to wear next spring. AS: What is the circular economy of soil? Natural dye specialist Babs Behan laughs when asked about her favourite natural dye plant. "Like people, they all have such a beautiful variety of different characteristics," she says. "But, if I had to choose one, indigo stands out. It's not like any other dye. It's not water soluble – so you have to go through this charming, alchemical, almost mystical process, to make it bond with the fibre. Then you take the fabric out of the water and you'll see it turn from green to blue as it oxidises. There's something so special about that because it's the colour of our planet. It's the colour of the sky and the sea – and we can't capture it from anywhere except from this one indigo pigment." The book also tells my story – because I worked as a designer for big fashion houses around the world and became incredibly disillusioned by the industry. I really wanted to find a way to work that agrees with nature and has less of a societal cost. Bella GonshorovitzThe first stage is mordanting – borrowing from a French term, mordant helps the dye to bite into the fabric. I recommend alum (aluminum potassium sulfate) which is what the fabric has to be cooked in. Also used in food processing, alum is not poisonous in small quantities and it is a natural mineral. People often forget that not everything that’s natural is safe. The idea is to embody circular economy as something approachable – where you can capture its essence in the title of the book itself. Every stage has tangible results that are in the reader’s hands. Since this circularity is on a small scale – starting in your own garden, in your kitchen with your own sewing machine, I call it miniature. However, it is challenging to live that way or even do the whole process of the book in just one season. Bella: I had the title ‘Grow, Cook, Dye’ in my head and thought ‘what am I going to do with it?’ I was growing vegetables in my allotment and working with natural dyes. And, at the same time, I started making artwork with a client of mine, an artist called Cathie Pilkington. And I just started connecting the dots between growing things and cooking things and dyeing clothing. You have to have a willingness to engage. You might just cook a couple of recipes or you might experiment with dying. You need to be open to investing time. That's the most expensive ingredient in the book: time.

Create heirlooms from scraps with Modern Quilting: A Contemporary Guide to Quilting by Hand, by Julius Arthur of House of Quinn. A brilliant guide to making chic, minimal quilts, ideal for first-time crafters. Discover the endless benefits of swapping food waste and fast fashion for homegrown produce, delicious vegan dishes alongside a contemporary yet environmentally-friendly wardrobe with the help of fashion designer, dressmaker and author Bella Gonshorovitz. For example, using an iron mordant with the berries will produce spellbindingly deep, dusky blues, while adding an iron mordant to the pesky bramble branches and shoots will extract bluish-green, dusty greens. AS: In industrial dyeing, the waste water creates the highest environmental impact. What is the disposalprocess in domestic dyeing – can there be any harmful impacts? A fully illustrated, practical e-guide that explains how to follow a sustainable approach to food and fashion

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That’s why I spent a long time on the sewing illustrations. If you don’t know how to sew at all, it’s probably not the best place to start, but if you have some experience, the onion dress is probably the easiest project. And the wonderful thing about natural dye is that, if you do have an old cloth that is imbued with memory and some stains, the dye works quite well with it. BG: My tentative dye ‘recipes’ are for 100g of fabric. It is hard to write down a dye recipe; from one day to the next so many things can change, affecting the shade of dye obtained. It may vary depending on the fabric, water pH level, time in the foraging season, the freshness and quality of the crop etc. The reason recipes are included in the book is to show people a tentative spectrum of colors they can achieve.

BG: It is safe to be disposed of in the drain. Water rich in nettle can be fed to plants. Alum water, or the mordanting water could be given to hydrangea plants. Dyeing is however a heat and water resource-intensive process. I always feel that everything can continually be more sustainable but nothing is ever truly sustainable.Bel: After a degree in fashion design at the Instituto Marangoni, working for threeASFOUR and Alexander Wang in New York, you studied Innovative Pattern Cutting as a postgraduate at Central Saint Martins and gained an MA in Applied Psychology in Fashion at LCF. Tell me about your journey from that point. Transform your fabrics into five exclusively designed, essential pieces of clothing, including a shirt dress and duster coat Who’s the author? Bella Gonshorovitz is a prize-winning fashion designer and dressmaker who has worked with Alexander Wang and Gucci. A long-time vegan, Bella is passionate about growing her own food and reducing waste. Her cooking is influenced by the principles of sustainability as well as by the flavours of her Tel Aviv childhood. A strong part of why I wanted to design in the first place, why I wanted to make clothes, was [to look at] how clothes become memory. I wear things for decades. Even if they don't fit anymore, I find a way to adjust them. I can't let go of things and if something gets lost, I’m devastated. When fast fashion became so big, I was just staggered that people could buy something and then just throw it away. Clothes are imbued with what you had with the garment.

Turn lightweight fabric into decorative bunting – make a triangular card template, 16cm for the top and 22cm for the sides, draw round it onto scraps of fabric, cut them out and sew the short edges at intervals along a piece of bias binding or ribbon. From sowing to sewing, Bella guides you with engaging stories, easy-to-follow instructions, step-by-step illustrations, and full-scale pattern sheets, as well as:The challenge – and the joy – of plant dyeing is to learn it well. "There is a lot of diversity among contemporary natural dyers, but what unites us is a love of colour and a taste for alchemy," reflects Susan Dye. "Using a pile of unremarkable dried weld leaves to create a hank of electric-yellow yarn never ceases to give me a thrill. Dyeing requires a satisfying attention to both science and art. Whether consciously or not, successful natural dyers are masters of chemistry and biology. We learn how to extract dye molecules from plants and bind them to fibres. And in all kinds of processes, it's important to control temperature, alkalinity, acidity."