A friend and fellow-mushroom hunter passed away last week. Liz B was one of the first people I met when I joined NJMA. I attended my first two forays alone with absolutely no identification skills. I ran into Liz on one of the trails and we started talking while she picked mushrooms and carefully sorted them into wax paper bags in her basket. She was looking for Cortinarius caperatus, the Gypsy mushroom, one of her favorite edible species. Liz made fungi seem so accessible even on that first day and she taught me a lot of new terms. She liked to say that she was new to identifying mushrooms, but she was quite advanced and did microscopy on the Amanita genus.
We had been talking about holding a mushroom dye workshop for some time, possibly around mid-late October of this year with a very small group. I was really looking forward to the workshop and meeting some other dyers. I've been saving my Cortinarius semisanguineus since 2019 to have enough for a small batch of wool. On our last few forays, we found some nice collections of Hydnellum species that will make blues and greens that we were especially excited about. I wish we had a chance to do the workshop together.
Liz brought so much good energy to our forays and she will be greatly missed. I'm grateful that I got to spend so much time with her.
There is a cool new website she would have been really excited about: mushroomcoloratlas.com We used NAMA for our species list, but this is more interactive with color samples. I was hoping to do sketches of all the fungi we used, but someone beat me to it!
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