Wednesday, September 3, 2008

on the shelf

Here is a great shelf mushroom we found yesterday and dh decided to shelf it up with one of our fav, in the woods, mushroom books..this was the biggest shelf we have seen and it was perfect...and huge and growing on an alder snag, with a pristine white underbelly. This was our second day this week mushrooming and we found some young phaeolus schweinitizii, or butt rot to some more ignorant shroomers, namely me...
and so did some dyeing having read in a book that if you add an afterbath to the usually orangey tan shades of this, you could get an olive green, so that is what I did with the silk boucle...I had already mordanted it in alum and COT and then simmered it for a half hour pulled it out and added 1/2 tsp. of iron, stirred and reentered the silk for about one half hour, then I pulled it and rinsed in hot soapy water...did loose some of the greenish tones but
I think it still has an olivey tone to it,
moreso if you blow this up you can see
the greenish beige of it...so another reason to experiment more...I decided to take Carol Lees suggestion and make up some premordanted fibre and have them bundled and ready to experiment with...so I did some silk and merino sock weight, and mordanted some in alum and cream of tartar and and some in iron, and some with nothing...then I will cut about l foot lengths of these and then tie a little knot on them, l knot for alum, 5 for iron, and none for no mordant, and then tie these three threads into a bundle and then I can always have them ready to drop into a jar of mushrooms etc. to do a small test, also good for on the road, then I do not have to test with large skeins at a time, but can do this simple test for many types of mushrooms.
I am almost looking forward to the rains as this year I want to dry some dyeing mushrooms in the dehydrator..move over food, the revenge of the natural dyer is here....!!!!!!!!

2 comments:

Leena said...

Just the green I like.. and the sheen of silk, relly nice!

The self mushroom is propably some sort of Ganoderma- species. Have you tried to dye with it?

cedar said...

Leena: I haven't tried to dye with it, but now I am interested...I will check it out, I have never dyed with the shelf mushrooms or conks, you are definitely a dye pusher!! lol