Education & KnowledgeYou eat this insect every day
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Nikolas Kozloff
AI6YR BenLet's try tie-dying this sheet with cochineal. Will attempt a mutli-day dye process on this and see how much we can color we can get into the sheet. (Soaked already in tannins dried, treated with alum mordant, dried, and then random segments of fabric rubber banded together). #dyeing #cochineal
This worked great! No messy scraping! Next step is to dry sheet soaking in tannins. May wait longer for more tannin absorbtion. #dye #cochineal
Cochineal dye, batch 2. The primary differences with batch 2 was 1. VERY little tannins. My tannin bath was almost exhausted by batch#1. And 2. The first piece of fabric is poly/cotton blend. Poly will not dye without special (toxic) dyes. It did absorb enough in the cotton to turn pink, however. The second is the Shroud of Turin...err... the sheet of weird splotchy spots. I attribute this to the lack of tannins and no stirring of the fabric in that bath. I may reserve that sheet for another try. #dyeing #cochineal
Well, that's unexpected. The "brown sheet" I dyed is on the left; it turned into an orange color after the dye with cochineal. I am unsure if the existing yellowish dye reacted with the cochineal red to produce orange, or if there is less available space in the fibers to absorb colors because it was already dyed. The one on the right (the dark colored/red/purple one) was a white sheet. The colors are a bit more muted now that they are dry (no photo yet). But, all the little bits of cochineal are falling off as they dry, and not leaving any color marks. #dyeing #cochineal
Boiled for an hour. HOLEY SHEET, it worked! (Actually not any holes in these sheets). Now to dry, then apparently you wash it and see how much color actually stays in there. I guess I will do that outside so no one gets pink colored clothing on the next load, LOL. #dye #dyeing #fabric #cochineal
Aborted attempt to extract cochineal and filter. Did not work, won't drip through a coffee filter, or newspaper. (Update: probably the better way to do this is to do something similar to beer "brew bags" or making a broth with a strainer bag, etc.) #cochineal
***I gave up on the extracting the cochineal from the bug shells through filtering... would not filter through a coffee filter or newspaper. So, I threw all the bugs in the pot, boiled it, and then filtered the bugs out using a window screen into another container, dumped it back in. There are still (whole) bugs in there, so I expect there will be strange dye marks and oddities in this. But... it's all an experiment, so... fine. #cochineal
