feeling a little Peckii ish....

Just back from a mushroom forage on Vancouver Island North, and found lots of goodies..

have many pots of the stove, semi sanguinea, although a bit disappointed in the quantity, have cooked them up, added a little washing soda and have some sweet colors brewing as I write...the above photos, well, the hydnellum peckii were abundant, so I am ever hopeful for blues, but so far silvery grey, there were two types at least the one in the right phot0 top left. actually bleeding from the teeth, and these were the most abundant, and the teeth were beige brown, with light ring around the outside edge, the ones on the right of the right photo , looked very similar except the teeth were orange...and the ones on the bottom were tiny and I have gathered them before here on the island...now the mystery one for me is the photo on the left....it is toothed, with white, teeth, large stipe thick, and smooth dark almost black cap....what the ???? is it...some type of smooth sarcodon, I don't know , but I did gather it, and now am researching to find out what I can, so if anyone knows this shroom please let me know, and if it is a dyer, that would be wonderful, and if it dyes other than beige, that would be more wonderful...I have sent the photos to Dorothy Beebee, shroomer extraordinaire, and so hopefully I will find some more info about it. It was wonderful to be in a new woods, after 20 km on a logging road, and then hiking where it was all new territory, and there were so many mushrooms everywhere. We are surrounded by chanterelles, and boletus of every variety, and the wonder of it is that they were not all bug eaten, and that there was hardly any deer scat, which was very noticable... here on our small island, I guess there just isn`t enough for the deer and bugs to eat so the shrooms we gather here are often sampled by both...

where we went is supposedly two weeks ahead of mushroom growing than we are, so I am looking forward to more shrooms here, although the frost is approaching. There is a definite lack of lobster mushrooms this year and I wonder if they go in cycles, as I found none on our trip either...so I have three pots cooking, one with peckii, one with sanguinea, and one with chanterelle soup, they all look delicious to me...lol

Because I FELT like it

The return of the felt, after a 15 year hiatus, has come back with a vengence...I am loving felting again and thankfully I hadn't sold all my felting wools, or washboard or mats, as I had continued to make boas over the years, but now I want to make everything...I love being obsessed with fibery goodies...and even though my back is l5 years older it seems to be able to handle this new work....here are are photos...

These need to be clicked on for a better view, but these are two partial boas, with long long wensleydale locks from England, and they are narrow with locks on either end...and some silks embedded in the main black scarf...The brown one is natural locks and one side is covered in the locks and it is felted with half breed and merino base with silk gauze embedded in between the layers to keep it from stretching out...I always put the silk in to stabilize the length....The top two are a wrap that looks quite elegant on, but doesn't really photograph well, do to well, the photographer, that would be me, and because I don't have an extra body here at the moment...but you get the picture....

and the rocks, well just couldn't resist, living on an island with an incredible amount of rocks, some just called to have felt coats put on them, so there they are, snug in their felts....they are so handleable....I always thought painting rocks was sacrilege, but apparently I don't think felting over them is the same thing...so there we have felted rocks....and olives,well it was a natural evolution from rocks apparently lol....

and last but not least the Vessel.....well thanks to nicole clasheen, an irish felter who is so generous of spirit she guided me through her technique, we have the vessel. The "all day vessel" as I like to call it, as it practically took me all day to get it stiff enough to stand on its own, but it is beautiful to behold, and I haven't even embellished it yet, so I am thrilled....next I am on to some nuno felting...with the help of nicole, and elizabeth of StudioFelter, in Australia, so my felting return is being fostered internationally...so so lucky...and of course there has been the usually natural dyeing.

More Polypores are soaking as we speak, and I have the bottom half of the fridge filled with premordanted fibre ready to dye at any moment. Have been going out a few hours daily, and the rains have finally shown up here, and we have even eater some white chanterelles, and saw my first Lobster mushroom just yesterday, so we are slow here compared to other places at this time of the year but it is an island, which is virtually a rock, so the rains take awhile to penetrate and get the mycelium running... so I have much to look forward too. Felting with mushroom dyed organic merino is the next venture, just after doing two xmas shows....so life is good, dh is semi retired and loving mushrooming and mossing and the sky is clear today...so back to felting...

Woad at last

Finally a success story with the woad plants, and this was their second picking....I started with three quarters of a gallon jar packed with leaves and poured boiling water over them ...then followed the recipe it Rita Buchanan's book which seemed clear and simple....famous last words...then after soaking the leaves for an hour, I squeezed them out and saved them. At this point the water did not look hopeful , very pale, and distant memories, or "second cuttings being inferior" kept surfacing....but perseverence furthers, and I kept going...added 1 tablespoon of ammonia, being out of washing soda, and then began to pour it back and forth between two buckets, as soon as I added the ammonia, things began to darken and look up, and the pouring resulted in bluish green foam, now things were really looking up...so then added the 1 Tablespoon of thiox, and let it be in 100-120 degreen fahrenheit water bath, for l hour, and the above results happened, it turned this light yellow, actually a bit more yellow than the photo, I had added one fifty gram skein of 50/50 silk merino, and l skein of brushed mohair....then left them for 20 minutes. The upper right is after one dip, and then let air for 20 minutes and back in for twenty which are the ones on the left....

so there we have it ...well almost, as in the meantime, I had boiled the left over leaves of woad, and added one skein of mohair to the bath, and got a lovely pale rose, so then I just added more to the bath, and put the leaves in a nylon bag with the next ones, so see if I can get even more rosy a color...I am almost more fond of the pinks than the blue...personal preference, but so fun to be getting blue from the garden, and from a second cutting...yippppeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!