This past summer I planted and grew my first dye flower - coreopsis! Actually, this is the first time I’ve attempted to grow anything and what a phenomenal success it has been! In fact, it’s been four months now since I first planted the seeds and there are still fresh coreopsis blooms popping up almost daily!

Over Labor Day weekend, my family and I decided to celebrate my 45th birthday with a trip to Fire Island. We are currently living in Sayville, which is where the ferry departs from Long Island to Sailor’s Haven, so it’s an easy day trip for us that we hadn’t yet taken. Unlike most of the typical Fire Island tourists, we weren’t headed to lounge on the beach - I was much more interested in walking through Sunken Forest, which did not disappoint!

It was the summer of 2021 when I first learned that mushrooms could be used as a color source to dye yarn - and my mind was instantly blown! At this point, I had been playing with natural dyes on and off for a couple of years and my obsession with extracting color from nature was quickly growing - but mushrooms? I had never paid them any attention before and this was a whole new world to explore.