The mushrooms are late this year, thanks to another extremely dry summer when the forest floor was scarily crunchy and the community held its collective breath, aware of the devastating wildfires happening elsewhere. But the rains did come in early September, at times with a vengeance, and now I’m feeling hopeful that this could be a banner year for the dyers.

In the meantime, a friend gave me a brown vest (handspun wool, handwoven in Guatemala) around the same time that I was wondering whatever I should do with a huge bag of mushroom-dyed roving. So I put the two together, using felting needles, to tart the vest up a little in time to wear it foraying. Each mushroom is felted with the colours it gave in the dyepot.

I’m not as happy with the front—I need to pull out the little bag of Cortinarius sanguineus that I’ve been hoarding so I can make those little guys red instead of pink. The other one is meant to represent Hydnellum aurantiacum (I took some liberties with the colour on this one because these little guys give a soft green while the mushroom in real life is brown with white edges), and I decided that’s the best I can do.

Now I see why people get hooked on needle felting—and I’ve only scratched the surface of that huge bag of wool.