mushrooms!

 Val and I went to Opal Creek for a pretty amazing mushroom workshop.  It was a blast!  Opal Creek is the highest diversity of some pretty awesome coral mushrooms that were popping up all over the place!  It was a pretty busy weekend, jam packed with all sorts of new mushroom knowledge!  My brain is totally happily full of waaay more than I thought I would ever know about mushrooms.  Owen is so jealous.

 It was a gorgeous weekend full of sunshine, waterfalls, mushrooms, friendly people, and great food.

 Plates and plates of golden chanterelles

 Val and I found some pretty awesome dyer's polypores that we used later in the weekend to dye scarves bright yellow.

 huge Russulas (gilled, white spores, stem breaks like chalk)

 Many Boletes (Pored mushroom)

 Cortinarious (rust spores, can often see remnants of a spiderwebby veil)  and above our chanterelles l-r black, white, gold.

 Emerging gomphus... pigs ear... see the white spores on the ground around it!

 Bloletus

Hygrocibe witch's cap

 and beautiful Opal Creek!

 Dyeing scarves with mushrooms!  The beautiful gold was from the Dyers polypore!  Mushrooms were just chunked up, and simmered for at least an hour.

Myra added alum (1-2 tsp per gallon) to them (I think)  The above are polypore, but we also tried wooly chanterelles, which were a very pale tan at best, but there was a pretty pink (that she had in her stash), and shoot I forget which other ones... Anyhow you rinse out your fabric (must be a protein based fabric... silk or wool, cotton doesn't seem to work well) in warm water, and then simply soak it in the dye!  When you are happy with the color (up to 5 min) rinse it out with cool water and voila, don't need to heat set or anything.

and fun mushroom gals!  Sally, Val,