Posted September 30, 2024
Endlessly fascinating, endearing, and delightful, mushrooms are currently enjoying a popular resurgence. They appear on home goods, clothing, accessories — anything you can imagine can display the iconic red and white cap of the fly agaric or the earthy browns and oranges of numerous other species. If you’ve been to your local Target, Michaels, or Marshalls you may have spotted some of these items as the fall lineups roll out on store floors. This is because while mushrooms can grow year round, most species experience their ideal conditions in the fall. In the height of their season these bulbous, odd, yet charming little characters can be found around every corner.
Mushrooms have had many uses to humans throughout history. In addition to their aesthetic appeal, they have been used as food, medicine, and in spiritual practices but it was only in 1968 that it was discovered mushrooms could be used to produce colors through natural dyes. A fairly recent discovery in the world of fiber arts, using mushrooms for natural dyes is credited to artist and researcher Miriam C. Rice.
In 1968 Miriam was teaching children about natural dyes at the Mendocino Art Center in California. She called these her ‘garbage dyes’ using food scraps like onion skins and carrot tops which is where most natural dyers begin their interest in the hobby. Miriam began to experiment with natural dyes to make inks for her own block prints and was inspired by a mushroom walk with a mycologist to toss a clump of sulphur yellow mushrooms into a dye pot with some wool yarn. To her surprise the mushrooms dyed the yarn a bright yellow and mushroom dyeing was born!
Miriam began experimenting with different mushrooms she collected, keeping careful notes of her experiments, until she had amassed a vast collection of mushroom dyed samples. She eventually compiled her research to publish a book Lets Try Mushrooms for Color, through which she met illustrator, future friend and longtime collaborator Dorothy Beebee. Dorothy and Miriam continued to find and identify dye producing mushrooms, bringing their findings to mycology groups, contributing new discoveries to the field of mycology, and publishing two more books as their discoveries accumulated.
These two women, artists, and scientists, Miriam and Dorothy, made several discoveries. By collaborating with the scientific community they found that the dyes produced by mushrooms were vibrant and extremely lightfast, a quality which is highly sought after in natural dyes. They could also be used to produce red, yellow, and blue, effectively covering the whole color spectrum. Mushroom species also produce consistent colors, so much so that the dye produced by a mushroom can be used to identify it. Miriam continued to experiment, developing a method to turn the scraps of mushrooms from her dye pot into handmade papers and finally into ‘myco-
stix™’: crayon-like pigment sticks made using the mushroom dyes.
Today the inspiring story of Miriam’s work and legacy and Dorothy’s involvement in it are told in
a documentary made by Dorothy’s daughter Myra titled “Try it And See” which can be found on
YouTube and on the website of the International Mushroom Dye Institute, founded by Miriam
and Dorothy in 1985 to encourage the use of fungal pigments, to further research on their extraction and employment, to encourage research and cultivation of dye fungi, and to financially assist artists and researchers participating in international symposia and exhibitions.
By Julia Ledo, TerraCorps Service Member