More bugs

Today has been hectic, the sunshine was lovely and inspired us to clean up the Saab, this is my father's car and needs to be sold - it's surplus to requirements as they say, so we took lots of lovely photos of it and will now do something about advertising it - not sure where's best though!

The cloth dyehouse was cleared out of junk ready for major dyeing week ahead - 15 metres of woolen cloth for the Weald and Downland musem plus hangings for our period tent plus getting ready for the Alternative Fashion week, Spitalfields, London - we have jumped in and decided to have a stall there!

I also played with the cochineal and sticklac some more. These dyes are so interesting, I thought I'd got lots of colour out of the bugs the other day, but found that I got almost a fresh dyepot from re- soaking them again today. I did crush up the cochineal which seemed to produce a new colour almost.

This is the sticklac exhaust before I added anything in - looks almost colourless, wouldn't believe I could get anything else from the bath.

But with some more boiling water onto the gloop as I call it the colour came out again. Not as strong as before, but certainly good enough to dye more fibres!

This is the fibres in the pan, just before I took them out to rinse them.

Pretty fibres

As promised here are a couple of pictures from todays dyeing. The results I have to say I am very pleased with - a lovely scarlet colour from the cochineal and a more crimson colour from the sticklac.

The recipes were quite straightforward really, I enjoyed them - the sticklac was really good, although I weighed out the 50g I obviously have much less a pecentage of red dyestuff to the amount of shellac left behind. Gosta Sandberg in his book The Red Dyes says that there is approximately 6% red colouring in sticklac as opposed to the amount you have if you use the already extracted powder - but I don't think that is really telling me what percentage dye I am actually using!

The cochineal we already know gives a very high yield of colour, for this recipe I used 13% dyestuff to the weight of fibres, normally I only use about 10%.

Now what colours shall I do tomorrow?