Cochineal and Rain
Cochineal is one of the few natural dyes that I purchase rather than foraging or saving from kitchen waste, but the expense is worth it because the range of colors it adds to my color palette is truly spectacular. It’s not really a seasonal dye, since I can buy it all year round, but I associate it with winter because cochineal gives more brilliant results with rainwater, rather than the hard tap water I usually need to use. If I could, I would use rainwater for all of my dyeing, but rainwater is precious in Central Chile, so unfortunately it’s not a realistic option for me.
It rains, if we’re lucky, in winter, from May to August. Even in winter, in recent years there might be only a few days of rain in the whole season, so when it shows up in the weather forecast I go into full preparation mode: I empty all my dye pots and put them on the roof of my apartment building to collect as much water as possible, put all my houseplants outside to give them a free watering, and dismantle my balcony dyeing set up (a small gas stove and a rack for drying yarn, the closest thing I have to a studio). Once I have the rainwater I need to use it fast, since I only have a few jars or my dye pots themselves to store it in. So when there’s rain in the forecast, I grind cochineal ahead of time to be ready to go once I have the water.
Once I have rainwater and cochineal ready to go, I try to use them to their absolute maximum. I extract dye from the cochineal at least twice, and usually dye 3 or 4 rounds of yarn in the same dyebath until it is completely exhausted. That means I start with a dark, saturated color, get a few different medium pinks, and finally dye the lightest shades until there’s no color left in the bath. Cochineal is pH sensitive, so I use citric acid to get warmer reds and orangey pinks and corals, as well as iron to get purple shades. I also like to use exhaust baths to overdye tans, yellows, or browns, and get a more muted, earthier shade of pink that is my personal favorite.
My latest collection has five different colors made from cochineal, and dyeing 800g of each color I used about less than 200g of cochineal total. And I even threw in some spare skeins of other bases to use up exhaust baths. It’s an ideal natural dye experience: reusing dye baths and materials saves water and keeps the cost of materials down, and I still get a wide variety of stunning colors.
We have access to and knowledge of cochineal today because of Indigenous people in Mexico and Central America who have kept this tradition alive. It’s important to acknowledge them and support their work. Two artists I admire and have learned a lot from are Dixza and Porfirio Gutierrez.
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