Dyeing with Cochineal: If at first you don’t succeed.

In this post I am actually going to be dyeing with an extract that was bought from a natural dye supplier rather than from something in my immediate environment. There are a few colours which unfortunately are a little hard to get from my local area so it was time to start looking at bought natural dyes to help expand the colour palette.

Cochineal dyeing has been around for over a thousand years and was famously used by the Aztecs to produce crimson colours. This is another dye however that comes from a beetle. You may not want to use it if you are vegan.

Dyeing with Cochineal

My first attempts at dyeing with cochineal were not the greatest. So in the interests of sharing the failures as well as the successes, I thought I would give you a quick run down of what did and didn’t work for me.

Solar dyeing with cochineal.

I first started with my usual solar dyeing technique on merino roving. I did get a pink but as you can see in the photo it was very wishy washy……some parts of the roving had very little colour at all. This was not going to work at all.

Heat Dyeing with Cochineal

I then tried my usual heat dyeing process, again on merino roving. I placed the powder in hot water and placed it on heat for an hour. After letting in cool I place the wet premordanted roving into the dye bath and left it on low heat for an hour. Again not that great. The colour was a little darker, but still wishy washy. And really, still pink. I had used 5% of WOF which is more than the recommended. Where is this deep dark crimson I had read about?

Final Dyeing with Cochineal

So I researched, and researched to try and find an answer. What was I doing wrong…it didn’t make sense. So I decided to try again with a few differences that hopefully would help. The first main difference was material. I decided to try and dye 2ply merino wool thread rather than roving. I knew that oxygen can sometimes have an effect on dyeing, especially with vat dyes like indigo. Maybe roving was just too airy and not concentrated enough??

Cochineal likes soft water. We are supposed to have soft water in our taps where I live, but I knew there had been a few issues with the water lately. Even with natural water I figured things were a little different this year. I had begun my usual coreopsis picking for the season. They grow like a wild flower up and down the mountain each spring. When I used the flowers this year to dye however, they were producing a more orange colour. This suggested a more alkaline environment this year compared to last. Then I was getting yellow dye out of the same yellow flowers. It actually worked quite well for me as I love the orange colour coreopsis produces when you add washing soda. So for them to be on an orange turn was not a problem. Due to all these indictors I decided to try distilled water for my cochineal dyeing.

I had also found a recipe that added the alum into the dye bath rather than mordanting before hand. I decided to give this ago. The problem now is that I cannot find the original author of the idea, so I am not able to give them the credit they so richly deserve. Please, if anyone knows of another blog showing this idea please leave it in the comments below.