Learn how to make your own homegrown natural fabrics to spin, dye, and weave, with this comprehensive guide! Inside this book, expert textile arts instructor Penny Walsh reveals everything you need to know to start making your own high-quality custom fabrics. Learn where different fibres come from, how to grow and harvest your own animal or vegetable fibres, and how to prepare them for spinning. The principles of spindle and spinning wheel spinning are covered, along with home dyeing using natural dyestuffs you can grow yourself, and hand weaving with or without a loom. Four simple projects—a rug, cushion cover, scarf, and hat—are provided to help you put your newly learned skills to the test. With the mighty textile industry able to produce cloth more quickly than ever before, and stores selling furnishing and clothing textiles in every town centre, why engage in the labour-intensive and time-consuming process of making your own textiles? The answer is a desire for self-sufficiency! Nothing could be more different from modern factory-made cloth than creating your own unique handmade textiles. Although manufactured textiles employ some of the most sophisticated techniques of any modern industry, using huge quantities of energy and creating waste and pollution, the entire fabric production method can be done by hand at home, using almost no energy but your own. If you want to learn how to be fully self-sufficient in making your own textiles, this book will show you how.