The Reds

i struggle for reds, but still they elude me. red seems to be one of the most precocious colors in the spectrum, and i have yet to get a good solid true red. i have been using Madder root and Cochineal, and have got a wide variety of pinks, fuscia, even a dark garnet, but nothing that is like brick red, or blood red. one book i have talks about what used to be called Turkish Red which it says is the red used in gingham, but it only vaguely describes a forty day process of dying and mordanting to obtain the fugitive color. so although the red i got was not what i had envisioned, i settled for it, because hey, it's pretty anyway. so i had spun up three more skeins, so for my dyepot of madder and cochineal combined, i had one skein for 'red' that turned out more of a mauve, one for a purple that turned out a great plum, one for a blue/purple, then one solid yellow for an 'orange' that turned out more of a rose, and the 1/3'd yellow dyed for the blue/green/purple.