I think it is nice with the purples, but I have not done any lightfastness tests yet. And it takes a lot of mushrooms. All dyed with fresh Tapinella atrotomentosus.
From left : 1 and 2 no mordant 65C 50 min. 3 and 4 no mordant 95C.
I had the temperature at 65C for 35 minutes and the yarn had a really dark purple. Left it for coffee and when I returned the dyebath was boiling, and the yarn had turned dark brown ( ! hm )

CANADA ~ Ann Harmer

We were blessed with a wonderfully rainy mushroom season for the 2016
Symposium on British Columbia’s West Coast, but the next two summers were so dry and the autumn rains so late that the dye mushrooms were hard to find and few in quantity. Fortunately, this year we’re back to our typical rainforest conditions, and the fungi are popping out everywhere.
We have a presence in the Sunshine Coast Fibreshed, a group that encourages sustainable fashion, particularly throught the use of local fibres and natural dyes. We plan a workshop for interested members of that group some time in the new year.

Ann Harmer had put just enough fungi aside to give one workshop in the
spring of 2019 for a fibre arts guild on Vancouver Island, so perhaps we can expect some new converts at IFFS 2020. Undaunted, Muriel Prior has used the mushrooms she purchased at IFFS 2018 in Norway to dye enough fibre for another colourful sweater, which we can expect to see next year in Port Townsend! (Photo by Muriel Prior)

ENGLAND ~ Carole Thorpe

Irene and I gave a talk to the Cambridge Guild on Fungi Dyeing early in the
year, which was enjoyed by all. A great many question and interest shown. I wish to mention Irene Taylder, who died in February, she was a very close friend and, I think I am right in saying, she has attended every symposium since 1993 in Scotland. Not only will she be missed by a great many fungi friends, she was a true a loyal friend to me and I miss her so much.

Carole

Dyed silk stained glass windows by Carol Thorpe and Irene Taylder

BELGIUM ~ Marina Lamsens,
Flanders, Belgium

‘Mushrooms everywhere!’
An abundance never seen before . We wander through the woods with a camera “to catch” the autumn fruit bodies of the hidden mycelia . We do not have baskets with us to collect specimens because... It is forbidden to pick them: nature protection rules So we continue our mushroomdye-experiments for small projects with the material we brought from Norway or abroad.
Foto by Marina Lamsens: Hapalopilus - happiness - Pyrenees, 2019, samples
Marina Lamsens

Maria Boto Ordonez showed us in the congres the exciting experiments with bacteria that create color! She does research in the Experimental Biolab for Art and Design KASK School of Arts Belgium, Ghent.

SCOTLAND ~ Marilyn Caddell

Greetings from Scotland. It is hard to believe that it is 26 years since we
hosted the 6th IFFF symposium here in Edinburgh in 1993. Back then the Scottish Fungi Group had a good number of members, which has sadly diminished. We really miss Jeanette McKeown, and also Irene Taylder who died earlier this year. On the plus side we have welcomed Veronica Collins. Over the years, sometimes together with Irene and Carole Thorpe from England, we have made group exhibits to take to the various IFFF Symposia. Recently the Tolbooth building in Lanark, the town where I live, was renovated and made into a community hub and exhibition gallery. I suggested that it would be great to put on an exhibition of our work for the general public to see the fantastic colours that some fungi contain – if we can find the right ones!

Our first group exhibit was a 7 foot felted Magic Mushroom to take to the 1995 symposium in Sweden. We joined the Scottish Felters and spent a fun weekend creating it. The basic mushroom shape, white with a red cap, was covered with a myriad of small fungi shapes and was a kaleidoscope of colour.

Then for the 1997 symposium at Lake Saranac in USA we decided to make The Fungi Quilt. Seven of us took over 400 hours to make it! The central panel is made up of 9” wool squares dyed green, yellow, gold, orange and purple, with the stitching representing Scottish thistles and the traditional Luckenbooth motif. The centre square has our initials, the date and Hale Bop – the comet that went across the sky that year.

At the 2001 symposium in Finland we dyed 15 silk scarves . The aim was toget as strong a colour as possible from the dye baths. They hung from the ceiling on two wooden frames and looked stunning, the shimmering silk highlighting the beautiful colours.

Some years we made individual items with a common theme e.g. using only
one mushroom to obtain all the colours; each having four 4” blocks of wood to cover the surface in fabric/felt as a set; and making sporrans to take to Australia in 2003, wearing them to the dinner on the last night.
Other individual exhibits included the following Trisha Gow - beautiful tapestry woven pieces “Dye Sampler” and “Mushroom Landscape”; Veronica Collins - Tapestry woven hangings “Shetland Sunset” and “Wood Wide Web”;Anna King - boxed Rolls of Fungi Colours Fiona Moir - Pin Wheel Weave Stole and long scarf in shades of purple and Irene Taylder and Carole Thorpe - dyed silk stained glass windows.

Marilyn Caddell – felt “Fungi Fantasy” and 2 embroidered flower pictures
We invited Ninela to give a talk about her work with fungi “Fungi for Material Futures”. As a designer she is interested in sustainability and zero waste fashion, and using mycelium structures to produce textiles. She is working with a furniture maker, Sebastian Cox, who has a small area of woodland. They are experimenting with using bracket fungi and mycelium to make furniture instead of chopping down trees. She gave a slide presentation of this work at the last symposium in Norway, showing the stools and lampshades they are producing.

In May 2017 we had a workshop in papermaking of polypores. Liza Johannson came down from Sweden, and we had some great days with her in Denmark. We had been collecting polypores all winter and dryed them so we had a lot. We gathered in Hornbæk in North Sealand and about 25 people participated. At the end of the day we all had some very nice  paper in different colours to take home. Thank you Liza. It was a great day.

In September 2017 the mushroom society had an exhibition in Rådvad, and the dyeing group demonstrated dyeing and papermaking and showed some of our mushroom dyed creations.
I hope to see all of you in Norway in August 2018!

Sadly we have only recently learned that Janette died a few months ago. Many of you will remember her and her daughter, Eleanor, in a wheelchair. Janette was widowed many years ago and as she put her son through agricultural college she asked Eleanor what she would like to do. “Go round the world in 80 days” Eleanor replied. Well, it took rather more than that, but the two of them travelled extensively to many countries, including most of the fungi symposia venues since the Scottish one in 1993.

Janette is second from the left in the front row of the photo