Tag: shetland wool

I have spent the last few weekends dyeing with quercitron and cochineal.  I did not devote just one day to each color, but did both each day.  The quercitron adventures yielded golden yarns and flammegarn, as well as exhaust baths I used with the exhaust baths of the cochineal.  For both, I premordanted the yarn with alum and tartaric acid as I wanted to move toward reds and pinks, rather than the red violet or burgundy colors derived from unmordanted wool.  I used handspun moorit shetland and commercially spun yarn for the cochineal.

First Dye Day

A couple of weeks ago, when I did the flammegarn, I did my first-ever dyeing with cochineal.  Using the recommendations from Trudy van Stralen’s Indigo, Madder & Marigold, I set up my dye bath the day before I planned to dye.  

I ground up 5 g of cochineal, combining it with 2.5 g of tartaric acid, mixed them together, and let them soak overnight.  The next day, as with the quercitron, I filtered out the bugs before starting the dye pot. Into this dye bath I put in 1 skein of commercially spun wool, weighing in at 50 g, and the handspun moorit, weighing in at 75 g.  This was certainly more wool than the 10% cochineal / 5% tartaric acid weight van Stralen uses, but I wasn’t too worried.  I wanted to see the results more than anything!

The wools were in the dye bath for 35 minutes (per van Stralen’s recipe). In the early minutes of immersion, the moorit and white took on orangish casts. These colors deepened the longer the yarn remained in the bath, moving closer toward red for the moorit, and pink for the white.

After 35 minutes, the yarn was removed, and 0.25% of yarn weight of tin added. Thus, 125 x 0.25% = .3125 g. I put in .3 according to my scale. Before adding the tin, the yarn was removed from the bath. The tin was weighed out in a bowl, water added, and then stirred into the dye pot. Tin is added to “bloom” colors toward the red side. Once done, the wools were returned to stew another five minutes, and removed. The moorit became a rather dull wine-red, and the white became a lovely pink color.

Pulling the wools out of the dye bath was a pleasant surprise. Each color was harmonious with the other, intense without being displeasing.

The next step was to immerse the skeins in ammoniated water, to further push the colors toward magenta. The pictures show fairly well the before and after colorations.

The wool pulled up most of the color in the dye bath, but left behind was a pale orange. Another skein of white wool was placed in the exhaust, heated for 45 minutes, and then removed. It had a pale orangish color, but when placed into the ammoniated water, it turned a lovely sea shell pink.

And you would think after all tihs activity I would be done, right? Nope! I had saved my filtered bugs and quercitron dregs, the quercitron dye bath, and the remainder of the exhausted cochineal. All these were warmed up together and yet another
white skein immersed . . . but you will have to wait to see all the final colors in another installment.