Rhubarb and Logwood

Well while the cochineal is curing, lets do something else.  Rhubarb leaves and Logwood.

Yesterday my friend brought these rhubarb leaves to me for use with dying.  These are drying.  I froze some others, used 3 for this session and still have some left over.

I boiled them in a covered pot for 30 minutes.  When I removed the leaves, I put them in a ziplock bag and the threw them away.  My dye book says the are poisonous and not to breathe the vapors either.  So I also wore a mask.

Take the water from the pot for wetting out the yarn and add it to the rhubarb juice.  Then add the yarn.  This cools the boiled water down to a point where the yarn won't object to the temperature change.

Replaced the lid and turned the heat back on.  Simmered for one hour and left over night with the lid on.

Also over night I soaked my logwood in a jar of water and wet out the yarn for it.

The logwood was measured, in grams, on a scale.  I didn't use my entire packet.

This morning I rinsed that rhubarb yarn and hung it on the line.

Then I boiled the logwood for 20 minutes, strained, added more water and boiled again.

I put the 2 batches of water in the pot and added the water from wetting out and then the yarn.  I put the lid on, turned the heat on simmered for 45 minutes.  I have now shut the heat off, leaving the lid on and will find out tomorrow what happened.

Cochineal 2

Good Afternoon!
Here is what is next in the cochineal dyeing.
They have cooled all night.

I lifted each hank from the dye pot and placed it in my salad spinner.  This spinner is for fiber applications ONLY.  NOT food.

Then they were hung out on the line to dry.  Notice I didn't rinse.  I only spun them out and then hung them up.  They are to cure for a couple of days and then be rinsed.  We are having warm weather and no rain so maybe Friday morning, but might be Friday afternoon.  I'll put up a new post then.

I read once that you could dry your cochineals and reuse them, so that is what is going on here.

Cochineal

This is my first time dyeing with Cochineal beetles.  They are a tiny bug that live on Cacti in Mexico and South America.  Inside their body is a red substance they use for defense.  When they die and are dried, we can crush them and use them for dyeing fabric, yarn and the are also used in cosmetics and sometimes as a food dye.  Does that count in the parts per million?
I bought mine on line from http://cochinealdye.com/.  Shipping took a while for the kit, but the 25g that came alone, went very quickly.

Step One:
Mordant the yarn.  I'm not going to go into detail of this now.  I will another time.  The yarn below from left to right is mordanted in groups of five.  Iron, tin, copper and alum.

Step Two:
Wet out the fiber.  The directions from the kit said to use distilled or rain water.  While it rained for almost 24 hours before I did this, is wasn't enough to dye the yarn, so I asked my DH to stop and get some distilled water.  He bought this.  I used 1 and 3/4 gallons total.

I then put the yarn in a stainless steel stockpot and poured the room temperature water on top of it.

At the last minute I found out I had enough dye to add two more of these hanks.  They were left from a batch that didn't work the end of last week.  One is mordanted with iron and the other has nothing.  They were both in a pot with some cherry chips.  We'll see what happens.

Step Three:
Crush the bugs.

Step Four:
Put the bugs in a stocking.  My DH gave me a hose clamp to keep the stocking on the funnel.  This way the stocking doesn't slip over the top.  Dump them in, tie the top of the stocking and place them in an empty dye pot.

Step Five:
While crushing the cochineals, have some of the distilled water boiling.  When boiling, pour it over the cochineals.

Let the yarn soak all night, as well as the cochineals.  We'll finish the rest up tomorrow.