Sarcodon Mushroom

Grey blue and greens from Sarcodon mushrooms!

I'm so happy with the results. I collected some mushrooms and made sure to do a bit of identification and yes! I was correct. I had a good handful of them but was sat that I had missed a few rotten ones. After looking on this lovely woman's blog, I ran back and picked all the rotted ones I could find. From what I have read, the rotted (or naturally fermented ones) have more blue to them. The other non typical way of getting this color - you have to boil the mushrooms with the yarn in the pot. It's the heat that transfers the color? PH was around 7. In turn you then have to have some wool yarn that can handle being boiled. These samples are gala yarn from dharma trading and was mordanted with alum and cream of tartar. The dye bath is a muddy red color and I had the yarn in the pot about 15 minutes? Smooshing it while boiling with the mushrooms to get it really mixed in.

From left to right - all with alum and cream of tartar mordant.

First dip 15 minutes boiled.  Second dip added a pinch of washing soda 20 min boiled.  third dip boiled 15 min. Last dip I added a bit of iron (not much at all) boiled for 15 min.

I was loosing the blue's by the 4th dip but surprised of how much color was left in the pot.  I wonder how blue it would have been if I added washing soda from the start.  Rinsing it took some of the red tones away and letting the blues shine through.

Adventures in natural dyeing

Once again I am dyeing the wool yarn for Green Meadow Waldorf School  This always gets me excited because I collect a lot of dye stuff for pots and couldn't possible use it all myself.  Willow tree tips, onions skins, marigolds, bloodroot, goldenrod, coreopsis, mint, black walnuts, lichen and mushrooms galore.  The list is endless and I always have a pot on the stove cooking or "waiting" in the corner.   For these yarns I always use alum and cream of tartar for the mordant and at most I might use a bit of washing soda to change the Ph of the water.  This year I used the stream to rinse most of the yarns to cut back on using the electricity for the pump - its amazing how much water just flows by the house - I need to use that more often.

 Yarn drying after the mordant process so I could store it before I used it.  There was a lot of yarn this year - almost double and I'm not done yet - just a few more over-dyeing to go.  

 I really love my yard

 I found many great oranges this year.  As always its so much fun to lay out the rainbow of colors and photograph them.  I will get them all out soon let you see.

 Onion Skins, tansy, goldenrod, osage orange all used one at a time but in the same pot so by the end it was all mixed up.

Madder and cochineal

Speaking of mushrooms...

I have some cute crochet mushrooms up for sale on my Etsy page (click here).

Go check out all my items including my hand spun,plant dyed yarns, (click here