This extremely dry season yielded me a handful, literally, of coral mushrooms—a clump of Clavulina coralloides (a white coral) and two of an orange coral, Ramaria (R.carnata, I believe). With nothing to lose and a desire to dye with something other than Phaeolus, I decided to put the two clumps together and see what happened.

The corals went into a fine-mesh bag, then into the dyepot with a silk chiffon scarf previously mordanted with iron (and tied with a few loose knots for mottled colour). I initiated my new induction burner, which I found to be perfect for heating the dyebath slowly. Determined not to lose any chance of obtaining the fragile purple (in the natural dye world, purple is known to lose its colour if cooked above 160 degrees F), I hovered over the dyepot as any good witch would, monitoring the temperature carefully.

To my surprise, the silk began to darken at 110 degrees. and I let it heat to 130 before pulling it. You can see, a bit off centre, the little bundle of yarn samples I also threw into the pot. These are mordant samples—a strand each with no mordant, alum, iron, and copper—that I put into every dyepot to monitor its progress. With these, the iron strand was also developing a purple cast, while the other mordants were pretty much doing nothing.

Here’s how the iron yarn sample turned out, though perhaps not as obviously purple in real life. Below is the scarf.

I tried an exhaust dyepot with a piece of silk roving, but the corals had been truly exhausted. I got no further colour.

I have every hope that next year the forest will produce mountains of coral, and I plan to have all manner of silk mordanted and waiting to be transformed by this royal colour.