Once I had been making dye using botanicals like eucalyptus leaves, black walnut hulls, avocado pits, and others, I decided to experiment with cochineal bugs.
Yes, bugs! Or insects….they make a beautiful pink / scarlet natural dye.
These bugs are a parasite to cactus like prickly pear where I live in the Sonoran desert. When looking at this blogs photo, do you see the white scaly stuff on the cactus? Underneath the white stuff is the small round insect. They are gray once cleaned.
I followed Maiwa ‘s directions:
- Grind the bugs in a mortar or coffee bean grinder (be sure to use the grinder only for this purpose) to a fine powder
- Combine the ground up bugs with water and bring to a low heat (not enough to boil) and make sure they are well combined
- Add some cream of tartar and full dissolve
The result will be a dark pink dye that is both light fast and colorfast which means the fabric won’t fad when washed in a PH neutral soap.
I’ve never scraped the bugs off the cacti in my neighborhood. That’s far too much work as you can buy them online. But if you were a purest and lived in an area where the bugs grew you could try it.
There are farms in Mexico that grow cactus for the sole purpose of “raising” cochineal parasites!
I use the dye to dye fabrics and also to make interesting fabric ecoprints with color as you can see from the photos below.
