While studying fine art in her early 20s, Sasha Duerr developed an allergy to the paints and solvents she used, including pigments containing toxic metals.

Rather than give up her career, she started looking for alternatives. Having grown up on Hawaii island, gathering plumerias, awapuhi and gardenias to make shampoos, she knew that plants could provide the solution for her dilemma. That knowledge launched her on a 20-year exploration of organic dyes and how they might help other artists as well as the fashion and textile industries to deal with toxicity issues that harm factory workers and the environment.

Going to her professors to start was no help, because they had no experience with plant-based color, so Duerr found herself on a search for dye recipes to build her own database of plant color.

Rather than considering it a lost art, she said society has evolved “to take us away from making materials on our own. The information is out there, and it led me to specific places, people and practices. It was like soul food,” she said during a phone interview from San Francisco, where she teaches at the California College of the Arts.

She’s making the information available to others through her books, “The Handbook of Natural Plant Dyes” (Timber Press/Workman 2011) and “Natural Color: Vibrant Plant Dye Projects for Your Home and Wardrobe” (Ten Speed Press), released Wednesday. The book presents a full spectrum of plant-derived dyes, as well as project ideas for brightening your clothing and home.

Hawaii is the inspiration for one of her Season Color Wheels, regional dye charts featuring the range of colors derived from 27 plants. The Hawaii chart shows pale yellows and peach extracted from aloe leaves, dusty rose to deep purples from red hibiscus, the light to deep browns of kukui nuts, and black to deep red of annatto (achiote). She’s also created a chart for the Bay Area and is eyeing New York next.

Teaching natural dyeing at Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley, Calif., gave her a deeper sense of connecting color with improving communities.

Edible Schoolyard uses the act of growing food to teach students from kindergarten through high school multiple subjects, from science to collaboration and community engagement. Duerr’s curriculum was based on creating natural dyes through the composting of food items, such as onion skins, which deliver colors ranging from sunny yellows to saffron orange.

Her experience at Edible Schoolyard led her to connect the Slow Food Movement — which seeks to preserve traditional, regional foodways — with the fate of the fashion and textile industry, undergoing similar pressure to be more transparent and environmentally conscious about their manufacturing processes.

She co-founded the Permacouture Institute in 2007 to reawaken what she calls a “dormant art form” to encourage creative, collaborative and sustainable design using plant-based dyes and recycled fibers to create textiles and clothing.

“A strong benefit is that many of the plants can have benefits that are healthy for you and affect your quality of life,” she said.

“All cultures used plants to feed and clothe themselves. (Herb-based) Ayurvedic medicine is still practiced in India and parts of Asia as a way to stay alive.”

Through various workshops, she’s bringing communities together to participate in activities that get people to think about sustainable practices, as much as products.

“I’m trained as a conceptual artist, so I like the idea of dye vats as a social bond,” she said. “I’m really enjoying being able to share colors and see what happens when I work with other people.”

She recently worked with Bi-Rite Market in San Francisco to present one of her “dinners to dye for,” a taco dinner after which byproducts such as onion skins, avocado pits and black bean water were used to make organic dyes that guests could use.

She’s also taught workshops at garment companies, such as Levi’s and Anthropologie, that are seeking to stay ahead of consumers who are becoming increasingly aware of the environmental costs of “fast fashion.”

The outcry to reject polluters has grown since 2011, when Greenpeace launched its Detox My Fashion campaign challenging some of the world’s largest clothing brands to eliminate use of hazardous chemicals.

Companies ranging from Burberry and Valentino to H&M and Zara have taken steps to transform their production in this way.

“It all comes from realizing we’re all more interconnected than you’d think and that plant dyeing can lead to more creative expression that connects people to clothing,” Duerr said, “because it has a more personal touch than fast clothing.

“Quality of life is extremely important, and we should care just as much about what we put on our bodies as much as we care about the food we eat. People are starting to think of living with higher quality, and less.”