Mushroom Dyeing

We get some of these mushrooms growing in our garden every year, and I've often wondered if they'd give colour.  I looked them up in one of my dye books "The Rainbow Beneath My Feet, A Mushroom Dyer's Field Guide" and couldn't decide exactly which they were.  The ones most similar though are reported to give orange when the yarn is mordanted with tin.  I haven't used tin for years, but thought I probably had some somewhere.  Sure enough I found a tiny bit in a jar so used it to mordant the skein I'd picked out.

This is the yarn I chose to dye - it's the merino/silk I spun in Spinzilla.  I have no idea of the weight of the mushrooms because I forgot to weigh them, but the yarn weighs 35g so I thought I was in with a chance of getting something.

There wasn't a lot of dye stuff, but I chopped them up anyway and heated them in some water to extract the colour.

The dye looked quite promising :-

And here's the finished yarn.  It's subtle, very subtle.  In real life it's very pale yellowish, probably a bit too pale for me.  I think this one might be going into the dye pot again.

At least I now know not to pick those mushrooms and just leave them for the mice.  They were obviously not the ones I thought they were!