It’s been too long since my last post. Papermaking mushrooms can be found year-round, so I’ve been collecting and processing them, then when time allows, I can continue to play with papermaking.

This is a conk – Fomitopsis pinicola – mentioned in an earlier post as the one that makes the strongest paper and which I use as a base when making mushroom bowls.

Sometimes its appearance is paler, as shown here. I like to find them when they’re very young – they’re white and look like little marshmallows growing on the side of a tree or log. I keep track of these  “nurse trees” in my internal GPS – I may have trouble remembering things, but my brain has imprinted the locations of special mushrooms!

Now that it’s warm enough to go without a fire in the woodstove for most of the day, I’m waiting for a good time to fire up my outdoor burner and see if there’s any colour left in the dyebaths from the November dye workshop.

With the mushroom dyeing season almost over, it’s time to get going on some more mushroom paper. Yes! – certain mushrooms can be processed into paper. (Or, to be technically correct, “paper-like sheets,” as apparently only paper processed from materials containing lignin can properly be called paper. But I’m going to call mushroom paper “paper,” because that’s how I think of it.)

To make mushroom paper, I use conk (Fotimopsis pinicola), dyer’s polypore (Phaeolus schweinitzii), and turkey tails (Trametes versicolor).

Here are some bowls I’ve made recently. Of the three mushrooms I use, conks make the strongest and most resilient paper, so that’s the tan base material in each of these bowls. I used a turkey baster to create the dark brown designs on the inside – that’s from dyer’s polypore (after I’ve used it to dye fibre, of course). The textured band on the bowl on the left is from the turkey tails. I do like the texture of turkey-tail paper, and I’m working on a way to make it less brittle – by adding a quantity of jelly fungus. I’ll have more to say about that in a later post.

I don’t have any good photos yet of a conk. Here’s an image of turkey tails (you’ll find an image of a young dyer’s polypore in my December 14 post). Turkey tails live up to their name – the “fans” that grow in tiers have subtle stripes in shades of brown, grey, or orange. They’re so ubiquitous they’re considered the crabgrass of the mushroom world, so they’re easy to find.

To make paper, the mushrooms have to be cut into small pieces and run through a blender with water until you get a pulp of the right consistency. After dyeing with the dyer’s polypore, the mushrooms will be in crumbly chunks that can be liquefied very easily. Turkey tails, after a bit of soaking, can be cut with scissors, then blended. Conks, on the other hand, have to be soaked until soft and rubbery – sometimes this takes months!

Once I have a nice pulp, I use standard papermaking screens to make thin sheets that can then be dried flat or molded to a shape. (I won’t go into the entire papermaking process here, but I’m going to have a workshop on April 26 for those who are interested in learning it.)