But first, a photo of my pal Sid and me…
And the house we saw for sale,
Must be a fixer upper… the tarp says “Catholic schools make a world of difference”, and yes, there is a concrete filled wheel hub weighing it down… Welcome to Maine!
Someplace I must’ve posted pics of these Cortinarius semisanguineus drying… but I can’t find the post, so here they are
They are known to be good dye mushrooms, and I’d say they are! This is after a few minutes in the pot,
They mushroom:wool ratio for this species is 3:5. I had 6 ounces of dried corts, so dyed 10 ounces of wool… 8 of Bartlett and 2 of some miscellaneous wool. Because it did so well, I thought I might get something out of a second run through the dye bath. Here’s everything, initial batch and second batch, including overdye of a few odd bits of this and that.
Top row, 2 on left are Bartlett, 2 on the right are whatever… Bottom row, far left is mordanted, second in is not, bit on the far right is not overdyed. The two next to it are the same, just overdyed.
It’s hard to capture the color… the second bath produced a melony color. It is more meloney in the alum mordanted skein, and a little more yellowish in the unmordanted skein.
Leftovers… the dye water is pretty clear,
Way more details than most people want to know…
I pre-mordanted a bunch of Bartlett. The guidelines for mordanting with alum are really vague… between 1.5-5 tsp per 4 oz. dry wool, with 2 tsp cream of tartar (no matter how much alum). That’s a pretty big range! Since I mordanted 20 oz. of wool, I used 7 Tbs of alum and 3+ Tbs CoT. Too much alum can make the yarn feel “gummy”. Bartlett is by no means luxury wool, and this stuff is lanoliny, so I’m not sure if the hand of the dyed wool is because of the lanolin or because of the alum.
6 ounces dried corts, 10 ounces wool (pre-wetted) through the first dyebath. Simmered about 2 hours, cooled in the pot, rinsed and rinsed and rinsed. I pre-wetted more wool for the second run through, but one skein was mordanted and the other not. The undyed wool was supposed to be all one dyelot (or lack of dyelot as it was the natural cream), but a few of the skeins were greyer, while the rest were creamier. I also put about 10 oz wool through the second dyebath… pre-wetted the wool, put it in the cool dyepot, let it sit for a day until I got home from work and heated it… let it simmer about an hour and cool overnight in the pot.