Posts Tagged ‘Cochineal’
The Best and the Brightest (Natural Dyes, That Is)
Mesa, AZ It’s April and the thermometer in the Valley of the Sun is in the 90 degree range. It’s indigo weather! Add some cochineal bugs, munjeet (a type of madder) and osage orange sawdust and you’ve got a rainbow in the making. Cochineal and indigo color some of the yarns used by Navajo…
Read MoreNew Mini-Bags in the Weaving in Beauty Mercantile
Tempe, AZ There are two new bags in the Mercantile as of this afternoon. I purchased these at the Pueblo Grande auction last month, but haven’t had a chance to add them to the store until today. One bag is by Emily Malone and it’s the first ever bag done in the Spider Rock design. …
Read MoreThe Dyer’s Picnic: Cochineal, Indigo and Madder
Mesa, AZ Last Saturday, I did my semi-annual dye class for the Fiber Factory in Mesa. We take a full day and use cochineal, indigo, madder and osage orange. Since this combination includes all of the primary colors, theoretically we can derive any color on the color wheel. Although both indigo and cochineal were used…
Read MoreDyes that Madder: A Rainbow of Colors from Indigo, Cochineal, Madder and Osage Orange
Mesa, AZ Last Saturday, I did the second of two dye classes that I do for the Fiber Factory in Mesa, AZ every spring and autumn. The second class builds on the skills from the first class and we add dyestuffs that are a bit trickier to work with but which offer big payoffs in…
Read MoreThe Navajos and The Amazing Cochineal Beetle, Part I
Jennie Slick and I are in Albuquerque on our way to do a three day workshop in Massachusetts. Just before I left Phoenix, I washed and rinsed some custom yarns for the students to look at. One group of them was dyed with cochineal. There’s a picture of the grouping below. Isn’t it amazing that…
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