Natural dye for hand spun fibre - before or after spinning?

I have only dyed skeins, as I don’t spin- I think you’d get more consistent color that way. Most of the dyeing books I have discuss dyeing skeins rather than the raw wool.

I would think that, as long as you filter the liquid, the webs won’t hurt.

I’m pretty sure cochineal bugs are used for producing a scarlet colored dye, so if you grind them up with their webs you may be getting the dyeing done at the same time! I think dyeing the fiber before or after should be fine.

They’re usually dried and ground up. I don’t know about using the webs – might mix with your fiber and be hard to wash out.

There are advantages to dyeing in any state of completion. If you like heathered colors (like those grey sweatshirts that are not totally grey, when you look close it’s a fine blend of grey and white) you can dye the fiber before carding. Then when you spin, the color differences will be slightly varied in the yarn and look like a pink version of that.

Dyeing the spun singles before plying, if the color varies, will give a barber pole effect as the color variations wrap around each other. Some people love this, some people hate it. You can also do this if you dye the roving before spinning it; the differences will be more subtle and transitional that way.

Dyeing the skein allows a lot of leeway too. You can dye it all at once for a solid pink skein, or you can sort of space dye it for an ombre yarn.

It may help to know what you’re going to make with the finished yarn. All of the stripey effects can look really neat in socks, for example, but might make a vest look like a Jackson Pollack. Or, maybe not. :) It’s all up to you.

As an aside, many natural dyes require a mordant to fix the colour, I would strongly suggest investigating this subject further. Some plant materials don’t require a mordant e.g. lichen while others, dyes sourced from berries, have very poor colour retention. It’s been at least 20 years since I last did any natural dyeing, but there was a time when I was an avid spinner of wool. I only ever died skeins of spun yarn with plant materials, but on several of occasions I tried rainbow dyeing which involves washed unspun fleece, packed into the base of a large cooking pot with enough water to saturate but only just cover the fleece. Very small amounts of variably coloured powdered chemical dyes are then randomly dotted around the top of the fleece which is slowly heated until very gently simmering for as long as required. Do not stir the pot during the process.

When I did do some natural dyeing with cochineal, I used alum as a mordant because it is cheap and safe. It worked quite well as I recall.

For what it’s worth, I am considering cream of tartar as my mordant as it is readily available in my kitchen.