MUSHROOMS, MISTLETOE AND ONION SKINS………..to dye for!!

The Placer County Fiber Group met this month and we all had a wonderful, dare I say, colorful time as their speaker, Elizabeth Standeven took us through the process of dying with mushrooms, mistletoe and onion skins.

Elizabeth gave us such a great day with demonstrations and stories of her "mushrooming" trip to Mexico. We all learned so much. One of the many fun things to learn is that we can gather mushrooms in this area, bag them up and use them to dye our yarn. She also brought a huge bag of mistletoe for us to try. We can all find that and harvest it easily.

Finally, she brewed up onion skins, which are always reliable.

Mushrooms fermenting

Our Mushroom Brew

The mushrooms were the star of the show. Elilzabeth had traveled to southern Mexico for a workshop on mushroom gathering and dying. Who knew there was such a thing? She is going to be doing a slide presentation for the Hangtown group in February so I highly recommend you attend: it was fascinating. One of the mushrooms she gathered and talked about is "dead man's foot". That particular mushroom and many others have to be bagged up and left to "rot" so they are liquid and can dissolve in the water. If you look at this pot, you can see some of them had not rotted enough so they just become a powder that floats on the surface.

Elizabeth had thoughtfully wound off small bouts of wool so we could try all of the dye baths.

The onion skins were the most colorful, the mistletoe was quite pale, and the mushrooms gave us the gray you see. Finally we had an easy clean up as the leftovers could just be poured in the outdoor woodchips - with the possibility of starting more mushrooms in the future.

Easy Clean up

The Placer County group always has something fun and interesting going on - I recommend you get on Bobbie L email list so you can stay on touch and attend when it works out for you.