Cochineal Dyeing with Analise Minjarez

Saturday our local SAQA group took a workshop at Oil and Cotton, a public art studio/instruction space in Dallas.  Many of us dye our own cloth, primarily with procion MX fiber reactive dyes, and we were interested in learning how to dye using natural materials.

So we learned about cochineal dyeing.  Cochineal is the scale insect that lives on the prickly pear cactus.  The insects are harvested, dried and used to dye fabric shades of fuchsia, purple and red.

Analise gave us a brief introduction:

And then she demonstrated the mordant pastes.  Different mordants used with cochineal produce different colors.  For example, alum acetate gives you fuchsia, ferrous sulfate gives you purple, a combination of the two mordants gives you a medium purple.  We used thickened mordants to stamp and paint our fabric:

Here is mine in progress:

 After applying the mordant paste, we let our pieces dry completely.  Smaller pieces on a rack inside:

 Our larger pieces were hung outside:

 Now the exciting part.  To remove excess mordant paste, you must "dung" the fabric.  Luckily for Debi, the self proclaimed "dung master", dung is no longer used.  The fabric was washed in a mixture of chalk and wheat bran, and then rinsed.

Once rinsed it was placed in a pot of boiling cochineal dye for a couple of minutes.  And then hung to dry:

Our pieces were beautiful!

It was a fun day spent with friends, learning a new technique.  What could be better?