Mushroom Color Atlas | Hacker News Reader

Mushroom Color Atlas

mushroomcoloratlas.com

339 pointsgaws30 comments

I love that this is on today's internet, and as its own site, not as an account in somebody's garden. Uniquely tailored to what it is trying to do and oozing with personality, but professional in presentation.

I have zero interest in mushrooms or dying fabrics, and yet, I can't help and be infected by this site's enthusiasm. Great way to start a day!

This is so incredible. My friend's mom loves dying wool with natural pigments (she even gets her wool from local alpacas!) and she'll go crazy for this. She has wanted a blue/green for a while and it turns out there's one that actually grows around us.

Actually a lot of these mushrooms can be found around where I live. I'll have to go on some hunts before winter!

edit: It would be cool to see something like this for other materials like barks and leaves. As teenagers we used to go around the woods finding her all kinds of weird stuff to dye things with... usually while hunting for our own mushrooms (not for dying things)

https://www.mycopigments.com/ also does lichen, and has plenty of guides and resources.

Just a heads up however to be mindful about toxicity of the mushrooms you select, however generally speaking the dyed end product is safe. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7277368/

Right, lichens are a big one. Thanks for the link!

Just don't eat any unless you're certain it's safe. You won't get poisoned just from touching any mushrooms.

One interesting gotcha that regularly kills people, is that there are some look-a-like species between Eurasia and North America, where one is edible and the other is poison. Apparently is fairly common in Washington state for eastern European immigrants (cultures where mushroom foraging is common) to die this way, because they eat something that looks familiar to them.

I believe you're talking about straw mushrooms (volvariella sp.) vs death caps (amanita phalloides). They are very similar to the untrained eye (and both can vary in appearance a lot from one spot to the next). One of the tells for amanitas it that they have an egg-like "volva" that you can find in the dirt just underneath the mushroom's stem if you dig a little. But volvariella species have this too... spore prints are one way to differentiate if you're patient.

But yeah, second that you can handle toxic mushrooms with no problems unless you swallow them.

FYI it is also available as a book!

There’s a YouTube channel where a guy does this with his native flora, it’s pretty awesome:

https://youtube.com/@justinthetrees?si=FCKrfjddLS7f8U2i

I have the book this site is based on and it's beautiful. My wife is a quilter and we plan to make a quilt from our local foraging.

What a beautiful idea!

Very cool website.

My first thought when I saw these pigments was about wine colors. A similar website for wine, showing different hues, would be really interesting. It could show the range from light whites to deep reds and how each color matches the type of wine.

https://shop.winefolly.com/collections/posters/products/colo...

I would love to know if there’s a wine equivalent of Modernist Cuisine

I made some Lichen dye from local shield lichen last spring. Still have it in a jar and need to test but it is supposed to be a reddish brown.

Also, I processed a bunch of Black Walnuts this month and I hear if you save the water used in the processing it makes a great stain/dye. It seemed to stain the concrete really well on the porch where the squirrels were dropping a lot of the husks too.

I will keep my eye out for the mushrooms needed this fall to do this method too.

Oh yeah, walnut is a great dye. No need for mordant, too. And everytime I drink nocino (an italian liqueur made with unripe walnuts), I'm wondering what my insides look like, haha!

Funny you mention it.

I made Nocino back in June. Green walnuts kept falling and I said "I wonder what people do with these?" First 2 hits on a search were Nocino and pickled walnuts...I chose the former. :)

The mushroom illustrations are gorgeous. Does anyone know what this style of drawing is called and where/how can one study it.

I believe you would call that "pen and ink."

The logo is amazing. It's only 3 simple shapes - circle, elipse, & triangle - yet it feels like a 3D mushroom.

the whole design of the website and such is all really good.

This is absolutely beautiful.

I’m tempted to make a color palette out of this spectrum for my plotting library! A “fungi” palette

Brilliant website design. Blazingly fast and useful even while still loading

it's really slow on Safari, I wonder why

Thats Excellent! I did not know that you can make dye from mushrooms - I come from central Europe and we do go mushrooming - we call that mushroom hunting. My family goes mushrooming in the woods with the kids and spends time together. It's a good way to spend time. Afterwards, the mushrooms are used to prepare food.

Apart from food, I know that the poor people used to make hats and other things out of mushrooms. I read somewhere that they also used them as building material.

No notes, this is cool as fuck.

This is super cool. As another commenter said, I'd like to see this for other natural dyes (onion skins, walnuts, etc).

Fascinating the range of effects available by printing using plants e.g. see https://wendyfe.wordpress.com/plants-for-eco-dyeing-and-eco-...

I wish more of the web was like this treasure trove. The nearest experience is a beautiful book.

The author wrote a book, so I guess this explains why everything are so beautiful and tidy.

Love this. Similar info to a book I picked up a while back called: the rainbow beneath my feet. the authors of that book have a lot of really good identification and reference books on mushrooms.

dying with natural materials in general: brace yourself for lots of tan

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