The summer of 2017 was cold and wet in Denmark, and gave way to a fall season with an abundance of dye mushrooms. 2018 is already getting old, but I haven’t finished dyeing with all my mushrooms from 2017 until now. 2017 was a really good year for dye mushrooms. And edible ones, too. In […]
In the summer, when all the plants stand tall, I usually collect good bundles of tansy, yarrow, and other wild dye plants. And they have to go before the next harvest. ~ My dyestuff stores from last year contained big bundles of mugwort and tansy, a smaller amount of yarrow, a box full of dry […]
Earthballs contain a yellow-brown dye, but also a large and annoying amount of tiny, black spores. So I set out to find out if the spores contain any dye or if they could just be discarded. ~ A couple of years ago, I dyed a lot of yarn with earthballs. The color turned out a […]
The topic of my last post was failures in dyeing, and here’s more. First, my most serious and most annoying failure as a natural dyer. 3: Organic Indigo Failure A while back, I experimented a bit with an indigo vat with fructose, but my results were not very convincing, in the sense that the amount […]
We recently had a heatwave here in Denmark, so the need arose for a project where you don’t have a huge pile of wool on your lap. I ended up knitting Hado by Olga Buraya-Kefelian, and it was so much fun that I knit three of them. The upper one in yellow/green is wool dyed […]
The weather here in Denmark has been all that bad in March. I suppose you’re supposed to make some comment along the lines of “in like a lion, out like a lamb”, but really, good and bad weather just depends on expectations. I’ve been sitting outside in the sun a couple of times already, knitting. […]
Dyer’s polypore is one of the very good dye mushrooms found here in Denmark (and many other places, including the rest of Europe and North America). It grows on dead wood, or parasitically on the roots of living trees. It grows in the same spot year after year, and grows a new fruiting body every […]
2015 is history, and it’s now 2016, but I think there’s just time to show you my mushroom dyeing of 2015, which brought a quite nice mushroom harvest. Fall is my favorite time of year. Always has been. It’s the colors, the scents, and the long forest walks. We go to the same plantation in […]
This summer, I’ve been on a few nice forest walks, although I know it’s too early for mushrooms. Or it’s too early for mushrooms except the ones that grow on trees – I found several of those! Mushrooms that grow on trees are quite useful when the tree is dead, because they help decompose the […]
Whenever I test a new dyestuff, or change conditions with a known one, I use 10 g test skeins of thin supersoft wool. I always knew that they needed to become some huge knitting project all together to show off the deliciousness of the colors to their best, and now the time has come! Checking […]