(or: What color is the bottom of a rabbit hole? Probably brown.)
Introduction
Mushrooms and berries 
Bedstraw 
Lichens 
Some of the Colors of Stonemarche
During the pandemic, I spent a LOT of time in my woods- wandering around, enjoying the silence, trying to not just stand in the middle of the woods and SCREAM.. it was also my exercise. It all started with an oak gall.. I was in my woods in late August 2021, looking for oak galls to use as Roman medicine for my Weird Roman Medicines display.
What I found WAS an oak gall, but it was like none I had seen before! Most of my oak galls are the thin, hollow type which are pretty useless for anything. I went to squish it to see if it was solid, and it bled scarlet red all over my thumb, and stained it. I grabbed this one gall and found another one like it- and decided to try dyeing some leftover wool with it…
the wool turned out super interesting, so I went back to that spot to try and find more- could NOT find more, but found a cute purple mushroom- googled it to see what kind of mushroom it was (Blewit), and read that it might be useful for dyeing (that is, by the way, a lie). *Poof* Rabbit Hole Obtained!
Thus began the Colors of Stonemarche Project, a very colorful rabbit hole of “Hey, I wonder what THIS does!”. Before this project, I had only ever used any kind of natural dyes ONCE, and that was almost ten years ago- and I haven’t ever dyed wool I spun.
I have been gathering natural materials in my woods, my yard, behind the kid’s hockey rink where I spend 5 days a week, and the nature preserve next door, and testing them to dye wool with. I have handspun most of the wool, and thus far mostly pre-mordanted with alum (because it’s easier to do that way en masse). I ended up buying a couple hanks of undyed wool because my experiments were outpacing my spinning ability.
Additional mordants include iron and copper (both made by myself- rusty iron I found in the woods in water, and old SCA coins I had that are pure copper). All dyestuffs have been collected from the wild/non-cultivated in New Hampshire. While I *could* grow actual period dyestuffs, finding things in the woods and playing Mad Scientist is way more fun 🙂 *ALL* dyestuffs are found near my home in Stonemarche, and none are cultivated- that’s my personal rule for this project, some things are escaped cultivated plants but were found way back in the woods away from any residences. I have mostly been sticking to seasonal dyestuffs thus far- mushrooms and plants that won’t persist through the winter. Most of the mushrooms are non-period sources of dye, but as they are ephemeral in nature I am doing them first and working towards more period and non-seasonal items (eg tree bark, tree leaves, etc). Following this post, I will be explaining methods, categories, and showing photos.
Click through to the pages below for the full set of the Colors of Stonemarche experiments- Natural Dyes Parts 1, 2, 3, and The Quest for Berberine. Photos are in Part 1, Dyestuff lists and bibliography in Part 2, Thoughts and Discoveries in Part 3, and the Quest for Berberine is its own whole party!