Ethel Mary Partridge, Ethel Mary Mairet RDI, or Ethel Mary Coomaraswamy (17 February 1872 - 18 November 1952) was a British hand loom weaver, significant in the development of the craft during the first half of the twentieth century. She met the famed art historian and philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy. The couple married on 19 June 1902 and travelled to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where he conducted a mineral survey. The couple recorded the arts and crafts of each village, and Mairet kept meticulous journals, photographing each craft she observed. They returned to England in 1907 and published their investigations into Ceylon crafts.

A Book On Vegetable Dyes This book is a result of an effort made by us towards making a contribution to the preservation and repair of original classic literature. In an attempt to preserve, improve and recreate the original content, we have worked towards: 1. Type-setting & Reformatting: The complete work has been re-designed via professional layout, formatting and type-setting tools to re-create the same edition with rich typography, graphics, high quality images, and table elements, giving our readers the feel of holding a 'fresh and newly' reprinted and/or revised edition, as opposed to other scanned & printed (Optical Character Recognition - OCR) reproductions. 2. Correction of imperfections: As the work was re-created from the scratch, therefore, it was vetted to rectify certain conventional norms with regard to typographical mistakes, hyphenations, punctuations, blurred images, missing content/pages, and/or other related subject matters, upon our consideration. Every attempt was made to rectify the imperfections related to omitted constructs in the original edition via other references. However, a few of such imperfections which could not be rectified due to intentional\unintentional omission of content in the original edition, were inherited and preserved from the original work to maintain the authenticity and construct, relevant to the work. We believe that this work holds historical, cultural and/or intellectual importance in the literary works community, therefore despite the oddities, we accounted the work for print as a part of our continuing effort towards preservation of literary work and our contribution towards the development of the society as a whole, driven by our beliefs. We are grateful to our readers for putting their faith in us and accepting our imperfections with regard to preservation of the historical content. HAPPY READING!

The textile industry has now stepped into the golden era of natural dyes i.e. dyes derived from natural resources. These dyes can be of vegetable, animal or mineral origin. This book mainly deals with vegetable natural dyes. After the accidental synthesis of mauve by William Henry Perkin in 1856 and its subsequent commercialization, heralding the advent of coal tar dyes (also known as synthetic dyes) the use of natural dyes had receded in the industry and had become the domain of hobbyists. A wide range of synthetic dyestuff was thrust upon the industry and it was readily accepted for its distinct advantage over natural dyes with respect to application, colour range and availability.