Where to begin?  It started with at least 3 different type lichens easily accessible on our property.  Or perhaps when I attended the Taos Earth Palette Conference and heard Dorothy BeeBee speak about mushroom and lichen color and saw the brilliant colors from those sources.  Or when I attended the red dye workshop with Dominique Cardon and Elena Phipps and learned first hand about the chemistry of and practical knowledge of working with lichens based on historical and archeology.   All of those came together in a critical mass of opportunity, knowledge and color!  Contemporary dyers can do this!  I can do it!  Over the last quarter of 2010 I experimented with our lichen to see what colors I could obtain from my valley here in the Texas Hill country west of Austin!

Resources used for dye recipes:

1. •Natural dye yahoo group and Sustainable Natural Dye Practice yahoo group
   

2. •Natural Dyes, Dominique Cardon & workshop recipes
   

3. •Colour Caldron, Su Grierson, amazing Scottish resource that gave several options to process and store the lichen during the process
   

For now, here are photos of the lichens that are on our property.  One lichen falls to the ground when the wind blows or the deer browse and I am able to easily collect it.  It is abundant and is not scarce so this is the one that I use.  I observed that the other lichens on our property were more scarce and I decided to leave them alone until I could identify them properly. 

I had three processes to consider using:  water simmering, alcohol fermentation (denatured alcohol) and ammonia fermentation (non-sudsing alcohol).  Most of these were run with 28 grams or 1 oz of dried lichen.  I have either crushed the lichen or just soaked it.  I have not observed a big difference between crushing or soaking whole.  I have been surprised that after 3 or 4 weeks I can use the fermentation fluid for a dye bath, ferment the dyestuff AGAIN and continue to obtain color. 

I am running the same type of processes again to see how the colors differ from batch to batch.  Slowly I am building up a vocabulary of the colors here in my valley.   Here are the colors I obtained with our lichens.  These were done on silk and wool. 

Additional  information will be provided another time on lichen identification another day.  The id is proving to be the toughest thing to do so far!  Identification of the lichen is difficult.  I have not found an image database for Texas lichens.  I have found a written key but it is difficult for me to use.  California, Washington and Canadian provinces have some major image resources for identifying lichens.  I need to search further.  I will write more another day about the id journey.  I have a long list of lichen sites I will be happy to post once I am more comfortable with them!