You may have noticed that one green is missing from this list, the dark green from Phaeolus schweinitzii, Dyer’s Polypore. This old favourite is consistent with its rich golds and greens (with iron mordant), and I hesitate to confess this here: probably because I don’t wear those gold-toned colours easily (and therefore have grown tired of spinning them), I’m choosing not to process any Phaeolus dyepots this year.

I know, that smacks of sacrilege, but these next few months are going to be all about surrounding myself with the colours I like to play with.

The mushrooms are back, the collecting bag is coming home full after each foray, and soon my dyepots will be going again! After a couple of years of drought that sent the mushrooms into hiding, it’s wonderful to see them showing their faces again.

Newly reprinted copies of Magic in the Dyepot have arrived, too. So if you’ve been thinking of starting to dye with fungi, or if you would like to add another reference to your library, consider ordering a copy.

This link will take you to the order page.

You may have noticed that I’ve written very few posts over the last couple of years, mostly because there’s been little for me to write about. The last two summers in this part of the world were scarily dry, which seems strange considering that I live in a temperate rainforest.

In the nine months of the year when rain is a constant part of our lives (I live on the West Coast of British Columbia, Canada) it’s obvious that we’re surrounded by rainforest: towering cedars, hemlock, and Douglas fir, glens crowded with sword ferns and salal, brilliant green mosses, and lichens draping themselves over branches or covering the soil surface everywhere you look.

But all it takes is a few summer weeks of no rain and unrelenting sunshine, and everything starts to feel crispy. Give it a few more weeks and the mosses become crunchy underfoot. The little brooks dry up, larger streams become smaller, and the small ponds become mud holes. The mushrooms know they’re not going to like such conditions, and so they stay put and go into retreat. It’s difficult not seeing these little friends of the forest.

Now it looks as if 2024 might go down as another fantastic, over-the-top mushroom season! We’ve had welcome rain throughout the summer, and already the August mushrooms have been popping out in such abundance that sometimes I wonder if I’m not being transported to that amazing year of twenty-aught-twelve, when I couldn’t keep up with the harvest of dye mushrooms.

This abundance has led to a renewed excitement about firing up the dyepots again. And it has also led to another development: Magic in the Dyepot, which has been out of print for too long, will soon be available again! Just in time for mushroom season in western/northern North America and for much of Europe. So if you were disappointed about missing out on a copy, stay tuned . . . it shouldn’t be much longer.

Gentle readers:

It’s been far too long since I’ve posted about my dyepot adventures, primarily because it’s been far too long since our area (the temperate rainforest of coastal British Columbia) has had a good mushroom season.

While my surroundings are still very much a rainforest, at least through the winter and spring, summers have become consistently hotter and drier over recent years. Last year the autumn rains didn’t happen until late October, and the dye mushrooms were scarce, with a few species not appearing at all, when I used to find them in abundance.

The result of this has been a shift in my own creative work; for the last two years I have spent most of my studio upcycling thrifted garments or making clothes from thrifted fabrics.

In the meantime, I have genuinely enjoyed sharing my dyepot discoveries with you, and I hope I have inspired some of your own joyful discoveries.