On October 19th five of us from the Sunshine Coast Spinners and Weavers Guild volunteered to demonstrate dyeing with mushrooms at the fifth annual Sunshine Coast Mushroom Festival put on by Shroom. It was a wonderful event celebrating the rich diversity of mushrooms that grow on the Sunshine Coast.
We broke up the mushrooms that volunteers had gathered and put them on to cook.
We had four pots going - Velvet Pax, Lobster, Dyer's Polypore and Pig's Ear.
Soon the pots were simmering.
We kept a close eye on the dyepots. It smelled delicious and around lunchtime we had a number of people stop by hoping that we were cooking up some mushroom soup!
One of our members Ann has an incredible knowledge of our local mushrooms - gathering, eating, dyeing, papermaking. Her beautiful sweater is knitted from handspun wool dyed with mushrooms.
I dyed some local alpaca with Lobster (pink), Dyer's Polypore (yellow) and Velvet Pax (grey). It's very exciting to have a local source of such a beautiful pink.