TIL: That There's Such a Thing as Mycocrafting and Shelf Fungi Folk Art is Popular on Pinterest, Etsy, and Ebay
We all know that @steemit gets its share of fungi love, mostly in the photography and food topics, but other sites are also apparently profiting from mushroom and shelf fungi folk art.
My love/hate relationship with mushrooms
I used to love to eat mushrooms, especially baked ones that were stuffed with breadcrumbs, olive oil, and spices. Then I got sick one time from mushroom soup and that was the end of that - purely psychological to this day. However, when it comes to photographing them, I have a hard time saying no.
Here's just a few of the shelf fungi that I've photographed (there are MANY more):
Steemit and the fungus among us
We have a number of Steemians that often post about mushrooms and fungi. The following contributors come to mind:
- @alexsteem
- @valth
- @haphazard-hstead
- @lightsplasher
- @cognoscere (me),
- and many others
But what I wasn't aware of ...
... is that sites like pinterest.com, esty.com, and ebay.com showcase quite a collection of mushroom and shelf fungi folk art. In addition to the sale of many fungi-related photographs, there are people painting them, doing word carvings on them, creating tables out of them, and various other kinds of folk art pieces that employ them. There's even a market for selling plain, dried shelf fungi so that you can whip up your own magical creation.
I guess I just always photographed them and then let them be. But, apparently, there are some folks who scour the woods in search of shelf fungi so they can snap them off of the tree, bring them home, dry them out, and create their own pièce de résistance.
Geez, there's even a name for this, according to Mycocraft: Conk Fungi | Wisconsin Morels:
Here are just a few of the links I Googled which show some of these mycocrafts:
- Pinterest: Artist's conks, tree fungus, shelf fungus
- Pinterest: Folk art, Folk and Shelves
- Etsy: shelf fungus
- Ebay: bracket fungi
Maybe someday when the Steem blockchain enables a decentralized marketplace we'll see all sorts of additional revenue streams for content creators.
And I'm actually quite surprised to see that Michael's hasn't yet jumped on the mycocrafting band wagon 😉 You heard it here first!
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Thanks for the great post. Shrooms are fascinating to photograph. Such variety, and all over the place. I have a few artist conks I have collected from Thriftstores, etc over the years, with some pretty impressive drawings of outdoor scenes on them. Very creative people etched them...as there is just ONE chance to get it right. Thanks for sharing.
Thankyou @ddschteinn, I agree they are cool to photograph and I have a hard time passing them up!
The artist's conk is great. When it is fresh, the underside is so white. But scratch it even a little bit and the underside turns brown and stays brown. So folks have to do their art in a timely way, while the mushroom is still fresh. And then the art is preserved for a long time.
I had no idea people did this, but it just goes to show that just about anything can serve as a canvas. I also was curious if snapping the shelfs off the tree is beneficial or harmful?
The mushroom is just a fruit, like an apple or pear. The body of the fungus is growing within the tree. So it doesn't hurt the fungus if you break off the shelf - and it doesn't hurt the tree, because it is already dead or doomed to death. These bracket fungus are "rots", either brown rots or white rots, consuming different constituents of the wood. Eventually, the fungus will consume all it can from the dead tree, and then it will die -- no matter what you do with the brackets.
The brackets do spread spores, which is how the fungus spreads. But if you leave any of the brackets, there will still be a lot of spores. That said, some brackets, like the artists conk, grow slowly over many years. So when you break it off, you are taking something that would be there for many years -- even 50 years for some. So you can see there's some tradeoffs.