52 Forms of Fungi || #33

While in the Paxton Gate store in Portland, OR last month, I picked up a field guide to western mushrooms entitled All That the Rain Promises, and More, by David Arora. If you take a look at the cover, you'll see why it caught my eye - it depicts a trombone player in concert attire, sneaking around harvesting mushrooms before a gig.  I laughed, and then opened it up to discover that it's actually a pretty informative and user friendly guide and then decided to buy it as a souvenir.

While looking through and spotting many of what I believe to be the species I saw in the North Cascades during the same trip, I was also inspired by some of them for this series and added to my list of fungi to knit.  The first is velvety black earth tongue.  The dark color and dainty form stood out to me, since it's pretty different from most of the species I've incorporated into this project.

This structure was knitted as part of my 52 Forms of Fungi project. Check out more of the forms from this project.

Succession / 52 Forms of Fungi || #29

I love polypores.  Mushrooms are cute, but there's just something fascinating to me about finding a tree with a ladder of conks growing up the trunk.  They pose a challenge to knit, mostly due to the shape and attachment element, but the colors are especially pleasing to the eye when I get to work on them.  Knit Picks Palette really has become a favorite yarn of mine, simply because of the fact that with 150 shades to choose from it's pretty easy to create that fade from light to dark when necessary.  I have a giant basket full of probably about 1/3 of the colors they offer - HA!

Anyway, what we have here is resinous polypore, created as part of my Succession installation for START Norman (on display for another week!).  The fruiting structures of this species are rather fleshy - I've seen them on trees before and remember the sponginess when poked.  They typically grow on very rotted wood - fallen logs, dead wood, old stumps, etc.

Texture || Fungi of the Pacific Northwest

Yes, that is my post title.  This gets its own entry because I have so many photos of fungi from our trip last month.  As I was looking through the camera's playback in our hotel room in Portland, I told J that 20% of my photos were of trees, 15% were buildings/landmarks/other scenery, 5% were of food, 15% were from our friend's wedding, 5% were of J drinking beer, 10% were of my fiber art installations, and 30% of my photos were of some type of fungi in the woods.  So here you go, a showing of my favorites.  If you would like to see the rest, take a look at my Flickr stream.