I’ve heard that paper can be made from mushrooms. I’ve seen leather-like hats made from mushrooms and there is fabric made from the root structures of fungi known as mycelium fabric. https://www.kleiderly.com/our-blog/sustainable-fabric-series-all-about-mycelium-fabric With some guidance from May Babcock, who gives a wonderful online tutorial for making paper out of all sorts of plant materials, including fungi, let’s try it!
On a Spring walk I keep my eyes open for any types of shelf fungi.
A small assortment is all I need to conduct this experiment. I washed the fungi and kept them soaking until I had time to work with them.
One nice thing to know is that I don’t need to take the step of cooking the material, I just need to cut it into small chunks to put into the blender with water. Like usual it’s good to keep pieces small. I used a small handful with 4 cups of water and pulsed the blender 5 – 10 times. Then I blended it for about a minute for good measure. I poured it into a my homemade deckle box in a basin with just a small amount of water in it. This is an easy way to test a material without having to get a lot of equipment out. I let the water drain and removed the deckle. I put a piece of screen on top of the pulp and sponged out more of the water. After removing the screen I couched the paper onto a felt. And tried a few more pieces which included a small amount of recycled cotton paper.
The paper looked interesting and had little speckles in it.
After the papers were pressed and dried!
A card made using a mix of the fungi & kale paper.
More experiments to follow….
