mushroom dyeing Archives - Botanical Colors

Sunday Visit: Julie Beeler of Mushroom Color Atlas

For this week’s Sunday Visit we caught up with Julie Beeler of the Mushroom Color Atlas. Julie is a designer, artist, educator and Oregonian who grew up with a deep love for and curiosity about the natural world. Julie says she experiments with the unpredictability of plants and fungi by growing and harvesting, observing and foraging, as well as tethering herself to nature’s seasons. You might know remember Julie from her FEEDBACK FRIDAY presentation or her Mushroom Color Atlas poster and dye marks we sell. You might also just know here from taking one of her incredible classes. She has … Read more

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: This Week in Natural Dye Questions

Each week, we are emailed with questions from our natural dye community asking simple and complex questions that we thought might be worth sharing. Here are a handful from this week answered by natural dyer in chief, Kathy Hattori, Founder of Botanical Colors: When working with iron on a larger scale, what is the best and safest methodology? I’m working on a project that is not big enough to requesting a dye house, so working out of a very large container (the size of a bathtub) and although I wear gloves, goggles and a (very basic) breathing mask, sometimes I … Read more

Mushrooms As A Source For Color

The North American Mycological Association writes: “In the early 1970’s Miriam Rice, a fiber arts teacher from Mendocino, California, discovered that many species of wild mushrooms were a source of pigments or colors. These pigments could be extracted fairly easily in hot water and used to dye natural fibers, especially wool. With the help of her friend and illustrator Dorothy Beebee, they published their results first in 1974 in the book Let’s Try Mushrooms for Color, with a second book published in 1980, Mushrooms for Color. A more recent book published in 2007 and reprinted in 2012, Mushrooms for Dyes, … Read more

The Top 5 Natural Dye Stories That Had You Clicking…

Each week, we take a look at the last to see what the stories were on our Facebook and Twitter feeds that had you clicking through. Here are the top 5 that had some resonance with you! Natural Dyes and Papermaking on The Fiber Wire: “These natural dye experiments started with standing in line at the store, my cart overflowing with stainless steel pots, the woman behind me chuckling, ‘Looks like someone’s doing some cooking!’ I smiled and replied that, yes, I had a lot of cooking ahead of me. I decided not to mention what I’d be cooking – cotton.” … Read more