Sulphur Shelf aka Chicken Mushroom

I found my first Sulphur Shelf mushroom last year.  I almost walked right past it, as it was high in a tree, and I was looking down for mushrooms.  We cut down that first mushroom and marveled at how good it tasted and I've been keeping my head up looking for another since then.

On my way out of the woods the other day a flash of orange caught my eye and there it was, right at hip-level.  Thanks Mr. Sulphur Shelf, that made for much easier harvesting.  This guy was nice and young and tender.  He was bright orange on top and bright sulphur yellow on the underside.

I cut off about half, thanked him for his sacrifice, and skipped to the house to cook them up.  This was a smallish harvest so I planned to eat them right away, rather than cook and freeze them like I might do with a larger flush.

And speaking of larger flushes...

My mother in law spotted this huge one on a dead oak while taking a walk and shared pictures with me.  Having the poker face that I do, I squealed and frantically emailed her asking if I could come and harvest.  She agreed and I came home with about 10 pounds of mushrooms.

This specimen was a bit older than my first one and I had to trim a lot of woody and buggy bits.  Those I tossed in the dye pot.  The rest was sauteed in butter and frozen in serving sizes for this winter.  Sulphur Shelf is one of those mushrooms that freezes really well and it truly does taste like chicken.  It doesn't have any poisonous look-alikes but if you harvest, be sure to leave any that are growing on pine or hemlock.  Look for those growing on dead Oaks, to be safe.  (You can read more here).

Yesterday seemed like soup weather so I pulled out the mushrooms I had sauteed from my first find and tossed them in to a tortilla soup recipe.  Oh so good. 

The results from the dye pot were decidedly ho-hum, so much so that I didn't photograph them.  I'm sure this is because I was using older mushroomes.  I think that with a fresher mushroom the yellow would have been brighter.

So if you see a flash of yellow and orange in the woods this fall, check it out.  It could be your next chicken tortilla soup calling.

wordless Wednesday

I know this is supposed to be a wordless Wednesday post but I had to share my sense of abundance, verbally.  I went on a short walk in our woods the other day and within 5 minutes had seen a dozen different mushrooms.  By the end of my walk I had taken over a hundred photos of mushrooms.  The ones you see here are a fraction of what I saw, and I'm imagining that I saw only a fraction of what is out there.  Aren't they amazing?

As always, click on the photos to see them a little larger.

dyeing with lobster mushrooms part III

This weekend, after dyeing wool with a different mushroom (more to come...) I sat down at the computer to find more information about what I had just worked with and came across an incredible blog that has changed the way I look at mushroom dyeing.  Shroomworks' blog is amazing and I read it front to back all in one sitting.

She mentioned in one of her posts about lobster mushrooms that she used washing soda in the dye bath.  She was getting lovely colors, much deeper than the pale peach and yellows I've gotten, and I was inspired to try again.  Our lobsters are now past-prime for eating (eating mushrooms trumps dyeing with them, for me) so I gathered up the mushy and bug-eaten for the dye pot.

I started by cutting just the orange outer skin from the mushrooms, another of her tips, and put them in my dye pot with some water.  I let the pot simmer while I mushed up the mushroom chunks with my pastry cutter.  When things started looking soupy, I added a few sprinkles of washing soda and kapow! Color!

I was so excited at the colors I got that I did several exhausts, resulting in various shades of pink and fuschia.  I dyed large pieces of silk and fine merino with the hopes of making a nuno scarf, because how cool would that be?!  I also dyed a small amount of cotton floss and a piece of vintage doily.  I love them all.

Even though I'm not much of a pink person, I am beyond thrilled with these results.  I've frozen the lobster mushroom chunks as I think they have more color to give, and I'm sure to revisit this again.  I can't wait.



the lovely green-stain fungus

September is National Mushroom Month and it's starting off with a bang here in the north woods.   While my patch of woods doesn't produce much in the way of mushrooms in the spring, it is abundant in fall.  This weekend I took over a hundred photos of mushrooms, ate mushrooms, and dyed with mushrooms.  I figured as my tribute to favorite forest floor-dweller, this week my blog posts will all include something fungal.  (like they don't usually...)

Today I'll show you the green-stain fungus.

These little cup fungi discolor their wood host, leaving it with streaks of teal green.  I usually spot the green wood but rarely get to see the actual fungus responsible for it.  This weekend though I saw it in several spots in the woods, which was pretty exciting.

I began collecting bits of this lovely green wood a few years ago and tried dyeing wool with it, unsuccessfully.  I then read that woodworkers have prized the green-stained wood for centuries, using it in detailed inlay work, and was intrigued.  The wood I had found was really decayed and soft, unusable for woodworking, but I still kept collecting bits as I found them just because I think they're pretty, and I'm a magpie.

One day I found a piece that wasn't decayed and I nearly jumped for joy.  I picked up the piece and literally went directly to the saw and started cutting.  What emerged were some small pieces for some natural-dyer friends of mine, including this little pendant.

Thank you Sonia, for the photos!

I have a small amount of this wood left and I hope to make a few more pieces from it.

In the meantime, I'll keep picking up pieces of green, just in case.

Have a great week, everyone.  Happy Labor Day to my friends in the US.

pocketed placemat tutorial

If you find this, or one of my other tutorials, helpful and would like to make a monetary contribution to help me keep wool in my basket and ideas flowing, I'd be so grateful.  By clicking the "Buy Now" button below you can choose your own price for the tutorial.  It's completely optional, but oh so appreciated.

**************************

It has been a while since I've spent time crafting for myself.  I decided to change that this week and do something with the canvas dropcloth I've been tripping over in my workshop.  I love the almost linen-like look of the untreated canvas and decided to use it on my tabletop.  A few cuts, a few stitches, and some collaboration with my little ones and I had myself some placemats.

Placemats with cute little pockets!

They were incredibly easy to make and here's a little how-to if you'd like to give them a go yourself.

Materials

canvas

sewing machine threaded with your choice of thread color

paint - acrylic or fabric paint

leaves

waxed paper

You'll need to cut two pieces of canvas for each placemat.  Mine are 11" x 15" which fit my plates and silverware nicely.  When determining the size I laid out my dish and the silverware pocket to check for a proper fit.  You'll want to adjust the size to fit your own dishes as needed. 

Cut a piece of canvas roughly 3" x 4" to act as a pocket on your placemat.

Enlist the help of children to do botanical prints on your pocket pieces.  If you don't have any children laying around, then go on and do it yourself.  Instructions for making nature prints are here.

After your leaf prints are completely dry you'll want to sew across the top of each one to stop the fabric from fraying too far.

Pin the pocket to the front of your placemat and sew down the side, across the bottom, and back up the third side.  Be sure to back stitch at the beginning and end so your pocket holds securely.

After your pocket is sewn on, pin the top layer of your placemat to the bottom layer.  I'm going for a simple look with an intentional fray around the outside.  None of that turning inside-out fanciness for me today.

Sew the two layers of placemat together, keeping the stitches 1/4" from the outer edge.

Fray the edges of the placemat and the pocket by removing the threads running parallel to your stitches.  Be careful not to tug the stitches out in the process.

Give your placemat a good shake or a once-over with a lint brush and there you have it!

Ready to serve.

My kids think the little pockets are super cool and the younger ones were eager to set the table.

Eager.

To set the table.

That alone makes this project totally worth it for me.

If you're so inclined you could also treat these to make them more stain-resistent.

I think these would be cute made from denim too, maybe with pockets made of bandana material or leather?  Or made of felt perhaps?  Or recycle a thrift-store raincoat and make placemats that can withstand a storm of peas and carrots, that would be cool.

If you try it, I hope you'll share the results.  I'd love to see where your creativity takes this.

natural dyeing with lobster mushrooms part II

Lobster mushrooms are a delicious, useful, and fascinating thing.  On a good day of hunting in mid-August I can usually find enough of them in our woods to make a delicious dinner and the whole house smiles when they see me trudging out of the woods with a heavy basket.

The lobster mushroom is kind of different in that it's actually the product of a mold attacking another mushroom, morphing it into deliciousness.  The flesh is firm, not mushy like some mushrooms, and it gives off a beautiful golden color and slight seafood smell when cooked.  We like ours sauteed in butter and garlic and tossed with pasta.

  

As lobster mushrooms age their flesh turns to a cranberry red.  Last year I used some of these past-prime mushrooms to dye fiber and achieved a peach color on wool with an ammonia mordant.  This year I wanted to try dyeing on silk without using a mordant, just to see what I would get.

None of the mushrooms I used this time had degraded to the point of being cranberry red and mushy, rather I used some that were just a little old and some of the wormy bits that were cut off of the good mushrooms.  This seemed to make a difference as the resulting dye color after simmering down the mushrooms in water yielded this orange color instead of red.

I scoured my silk, stuffed it in the jar with the dye, and let it percolate in the heat for about a week in my small greenhouse.  The silk took up some color right away and it only deepened slightly over the course of the week.

At the end of the week I removed the silk and gave it a rinse. 

The resulting color is an orangey yellow, a little deeper than the photos are showing.

I'm really loving using the silk for dyeing and can't wait to work on a project with some of these pieces.  What I love more is when I can use cast-offs like mushroom bits, onion skins, carrot peels, bean water, etc. for making something beautiful.  It makes me look at my compost pile in a whole new way.

I hope you're making some fun discoveries today too.