mushroom dyeing                                            

Mushrooms create a surprising array of colors. Each of these wool skeins was dyed using only mushroom caps and/or stems with a mordant.

I think anyone who lives among misty mountains probably develops an interest in mushrooms sooner or later. I did, and not long after my first foray heard about using mushrooms as dyestuffs.  My first experiment into mushroom dyeing I did on my own. I had violet toothed polypores (Trichaptum before) growing on downed cherry around the cabin and knew that woodworkers used them to spalt wood, creating a pink stain in the grain (read more). It seemed a likely place to start. After drying the mushrooms, I steeped them in the dyebath, which I cooked up in a big pot over the fire ring outside.  I felt a bit like the witches in “Macbeth.” Handspun merino, which I had mordanted with an alum, acquired a pale champagne color. It was pleasant enough, and turned out to be relatively colorfast, but this was more ‘mushroomy’ than the pink I was hoping for. So I took a three-day workshop at the late, lamented Manning’s weaving school in Pennsylvania. The skeins pictured above were all dyed there.

I have read in a number of places that mushroom dyeing was invented more or less ex nihilo in the early 1970s by Miriam C. Rice, who was an art teacher in the Pacific Northwest. Certainly, she was the first to see its full potential, but dyers had been using at least one fungus for centuries. That is Phaeolus schweinitzii, commonly known as the Dyer's polypore. It produces colors from yellow and brown to mossy green. The range of colors from other mushroons, however, is wider, well beyond the earthy tones you might expect: from azure blues and sprucy greens, to purples and fuschia. 

I contributed a piece about my experience for the newsletter of the Mycological Association of Washington, but unfortunately back copies of “The Sporophore” are no longer available to non-members. As I work on building back this page, I am including this link to a brief article from the North American Mycological Association.