At the end of the forty-five minute simmering of my natural dye experiments, the red was gorgeous and the goldenrod was a beautiful, glistening honey color. The hydrangea leaves, on the other hand, had tanked. It was kind of a pale gray with a tinge of yellow green. Not very exciting.
In the pot:
As I walked out on the back porch to drain yet another pot of wool I noticed these flowers. 
Not the “Oh, that’s pretty” sort of notice, nor the “I need to water or deadhead those” kind. It was the “Red = Color = Dye!” kind of notice. Eaten up by curiosity I ran back inside and grabbed a paper towel. Come to find out, rubbing the flower with the towel produces a shade of delightful pinky-red! Vivid and intense enough to make dyeing with it seem possible.
Needless to say I promptly forgot about wool washing (although I did get the next batch in the degreaser) and switched to natural dyeing. You can imagine my excitement. A whole new world of discovery opened up! In two minutes flat I was picturing myself discovering an as yet untried dye stuff and bursting on the natural dyeing scene on Ravelry with an amazing revelation. My blog stats would soar, I’d walk on air for days . . . and I was getting carried away. I reeled myself back in and did the obvious. I picked the flowers.
Through a turn of events I had today off from my usual work, so I decided to go ahead and pre-mordant the merino yarn in preparation for Saturday’s cochineal adventure. This is harder than it sounds because during my research into the field of natural dyeing I discovered that there were hundreds of “perfect, never-fail” recipes—all of them slightly different and some even contradicting each other.
My conclusion is this: get over it and jump in.