I was a little hesitant when I decided to incorporate cochineal into my dye experiments. While it’s an amazing colour, it is not my colour, and it’s honestly tough to see myself using it. But in the spirit of experimentation, I decided to give it a go. I used extract because I didn’t feel confident in extracting the colour myself, so while normally I do use the actual dyestuff rather than extract where possible, since I was doing so many samples, I made this one a bit easier. I used the extract at 1% WOF, and the water was kept at a pH of 7 with a temperature of 85C, and everything was dyed together in the same dye pot for 1 hour.
As mentioned above, this hot pink/fushia is not my colour, although I am in awe of this colour (and the strength of it) coming from nature. While it’s not my personal favourite, you can’t deny how amazing it is. I think cochineal (and to a lesser extent, lac, which I’ll show next post) are the most dramatic of all the differences in tannin and mordant. The samples are:
Cotton samples, top row, L-R:
gallnut, myrobalan, sumac, cutch, tannin blend on alum/soda ash
cotton samples, middle row L-R:
gallnut, myrobalan, sumac, cutch, tannin blend on aluminum acetate
Wool samples, bottom row L-R:
White wool, grey wool
(to see how I treated each sample with tannin/mordant, please see this introductory post)
Those two off to the right hand side are two samples where I pushed the pH to 4 in an afterbath. The cotton I didn’t keep track of the mordant/tannin (doh), but the bottom was white wool that looked exactly like the white wool sample to the left. So while the colour definitely changed, the change in pH also caused a lot of the dye to discharge, which I did not anticipate. I also couldn’t really find any information on exactly why this happened, or anybody else who had had the same experience. So that one is a bit of a mystery. Next time I’m going to experiment with cochineal and change the pH though, I’ll do it in the dye bath rather than an afterbath.
I was surprised that the myrobalan sample with the alum/soda ash gave so much more richness of colour than any other sample, although the tone the cutch imparted by taking down that pink a bit I really like. I might explore that one again in the future.
I would like to do a lot more tests with cochineal. While I can’t stress enough these are not my colours (did I mention that yet?) I know it’s highly sensitive to pH, and when used with under and overdyeing I’ve seen some absolutely amazing colours. I’d also like to see some colour shifts with iron to see what that does. If I have time this summer I’d like to do a lot more experimentation with it, especially to see if that discharge happens again when the pH is pushed so far to the acidic.
This is part 5 of a several (on-going) part series. You can see the whole series as they get discussed here.