a rainbow of color…from mushrooms?
It was the summer of 2021 when I first learned that mushrooms could be used as a color source to dye yarn - and my mind was instantly blown! At this point, I had been playing with natural dyes on and off for a couple of years and my obsession with extracting color from nature was quickly growing - but mushrooms? I had never paid them any attention before and this was a whole new world to explore.
It had rained recently, so our yard was full of all kinds of mushrooms and I got to work right away picking every last one out of the ground before the lawn service was to arrive the next day. I had quite a haul and promptly posted a picture of the collection of mushrooms I had gathered in a Facebook group of like-minded individuals - only to be told that everything I had collected was a dye dud! Several hours of hard work and a sore back later, and absolutely nothing I had found was going to yield me any color - and I quickly realized there was a lot I needed to learn.
My collection of “dye duds.”
Eager to acquire information and find mushrooms that actually would produce color, I began to seek out all the resources I could find about dyeing wool with mushrooms and found that the North American Mycological Association website was a great place to start. Here, I found the short history of mushroom dyeing and learned we have one very clever woman to thank for her experiments in throwing mushrooms and wool into dyepots in the early 1970’s. Miriam C. Rice was her name and in 1985 she established the International Mushroom Dye Institute (IMDI), “a non-profit organization that was created to encourage the use of fungal pigments, to further research on their extraction and employment, to encourage research and cultivation of dye fungi, and to financially assist artists and researchers to participate in international symposia and exhibitions.”
Additionally, Alissa Allen of Mycopigments runs a wonderfully friendly and informative Facebook group called Mushroom and Lichen Dyers United - just browsing through the posts and photos of group members will leave you awestruck and inspired.
I encourage you to dive into everything I’ve linked above for endless inspiration and information about this amazing topic. One resource that I have permanently saved in my iPhone is this list of dye mushrooms. Whenever I am out hunting for dye mushrooms I will do my best identification (most often with the assistance of an app such as iNaturalist, though apps are often only a starting point for identification) and then check the dye list prior to collecting. I’ve been slowly learning what aspects of mushrooms to look out for, which mushrooms I’m most likely to find in my area, and the potential color they might give (mushroom dyeing is quite finicky!) in the dye bath. My first very exciting find was a fruitful amount of tooth fungi, which I’m pretty sure (though not 100% positive) can be identified as Hydnellum concrescens. Whatever the proper identification, I successfully extracted a gorgeous teal green and felt on top of the world!
My first exciting dye mushroom find - likely Hydnellum concrescens
Absolutely gorgeous teal green hues achieved through successful dye extraction of Hydnellum.
Can you see why I was hooked on mushrooms for dyeing? These colors are not easily obtained from natural sources. Sources of blues and greens are pretty much exclusively obtained from either indigo or woad, and I’ve not yet had the opportunity to dye with either. Needless to say, once I found I was able to produce such gorgeous colors as these from mushrooms, there was no looking back.
A few months later, I was fortunate to find many mushrooms of the Cortinarius species, which are well known for producing various shades of red and orange. In my area, Cortinarius semisanguineas is the variety that I’ve found. This is a very fun dye mushroom to work with because you can achieve a variety of colors depending upon which parts of the mushroom you use. You can use the caps only to get the red tones, the stems only to get yellows, or throw the whole mushroom in together to get shades of orange. You can also reuse the dye bath and produce paler shades equally as beautiful and varied. This one mushroom alone yielded me half of my rainbow! You do need to collect quite a lot of mushrooms to get a decent saturation of color, though. I was quite lucky to find as many as I did that first year!
Cortinarius semisanguineas mushroom
A gorgeous range of orange and pinks from my first time dyeing with Cortinarius semisanguineas mushrooms.
As for the purples, even though there are a few specific mushrooms that yield purple dye, I’ve not yet been able to find them. One famous source of purple is the Jack-o-lantern mushroom, but specifically the type you can find only on the west coast, so sadly I’m out of luck there. Thankfully, I’ve found another source of purple, though it doesn’t come from mushrooms but, rather, lichen! I’ll tease you with a picture, but I’ll save that post for another day.
Incredible purples produced from lichen!
I hope I’m leaving you as intrigued and fascinated with the colors mushrooms are able to produce as I’ve been since I first discovered their color potential! I’ve been having endless fun putting together rainbows of yarn I’ve dyed with both mushrooms and lichens and these mini skein sets are now available as limited edition items in my shop! I’ll leave you with one of my favorite examples of mushroom rainbows I’ve created and I hope you’ll check out all the mushroom rainbows available in my shop for a limited time. I’m always eager to create these rainbows and hope to be able to offer them again in the future. There are also several stand-alone full skeins that you can find by browsing the mushroom dyed and lichen dyed sections of my shop if you’re interested in a specific color.
My favorite rainbow ever that I’ve dyed with mushrooms and lichen!
