i purchased a bag of cochineal -- which is an insect-derived natural red dye -- last winter, and this weekend, got up the nerve to use it. dyeing with cochineal requires mordanting, which is something i was not all that comfortable with. different mordants will produce different hues, and i had purchased some alum to get a good deep scarlet. (next to black, i love red the most.)
just talking about the mordanting last night -- along with ordering letterpress cuts to be made from some original art for an upcoming book project, and talking about magnesium v. copper, had me all hopped up and anxious about metals. ben told me, for instance, that pure magnesium ignites on contact with air. so last evening i kept peering around corners in fear of running into pure magnesium, like it was donald pleasence in a james bond film.
we got through the mordanting process unscathed, although it kept me hopped up late into the night and we ended up eating, well, breakfast at the oregon diner. which, although the phrase is overused, is like a fellini casting call. also, there appears to be a large statue of, well, stalin, on oregon avenue... ben insists that he is the franchise owner of the south philadelphia fashion bug shoppes. complete with imitation of stalin that i guarantee none of you will ever, ever see, not even after a few glasses of wine on thanksgiving.
anyway. what i wanted to turn red was -- this handspun soy silk of mine, and this skein of noro kureyon.
notice that the soy silk has bits of blue in it -- i threw it in an indigo pot last year, before it was spun up, when it was still roving. the indigo dyepot had been near exhaustion at that stage, and so you see, blue only showed up in certain spots. then i spun it, and got this. the plan was to overdye. that's where the cochineal came in.
i got the cochineal dyebath going while ben slept. unlike the mordanting process, this was fun -- and utterly perfumey! a really, really sweet and exotic smell. and when the first batch of it was ready -- it was a mezmerizing, slasher-movie, heart's-blood red.
"smells like... pancakes," said the barely coherent man who had only gotten up to go to the bathroom.
anyway, the dyebath is not quite exhausted yet, but when it is, it will go outside to be used as compost for none other than the indigo plants. right now the effect of this project on our kitchen is no less than hitchcockian. downright.