Everyone had a great time at our mushroom dyeing workshop here at Bluff Hollow last Friday. Fortunately, the mushrooms have been abundant – after an iffy summer with very little rain – and we had some interesting and productive dyepots.

Here Julie is untangling some wool just out of a Phaeolus dyepot – we had enough young ones to give us a strong colour (here mordanted with copper).

Lobster mushrooms (Hypomyces lactifluorum) are exceptionally abundant this year, to the point where I had to carry a good ten pounds of them up a steep hill to get them home one day!

Here a few members of the class are paring off the red “skins” to put in the dyepot – we got some lovely reds out of this one, which you’ll see in the group photo below. I’ll post close-up photos soon.

Silvia, who attended the 2008 Fungi & Fibre Symposium with me, joined us and brought a Boletopsis that she’d kept in the freezer since last year. Sometimes they’ll give a nice green; here we seemed to get a nice grey. Nothing wrong with a good neutral . . .

And here are all the marvelous colours we got! Closeups and descriptions of the mushrooms will follow in a couple of weeks (I’m going away, to decompress after the weekend’s fabulous Mushroom Festival – more about that later, too).