Spalting 101: The Ultimate How-to Guide to Coloring Wood With Fungi

A step-by-step guide to DIY spalting—harnessing fungi to create spectacular colors and lines in wood.

Take your spalting time from years to hours in this detailed DIY guide to spalting wood. No more beer, mayonnaise, leaves, and blind hope. Instead, this guide gives you the specific instructions you need for successfully inducing spalting in wood.

Learn how to get amazing colors and lines while minimizing time and decay, whether you're working with green to dry timber, with inside conditions or out, with zone lines or pigment, and more. A basic explanation of wood structure and fungal anatomy explains the whys behind the transformations. Next, learn the different types of spalting, their temperature/moisture content preferences and their time frames, and how to make your own fungal pigments.

This comprehensive guide debunks myths and offers detailed guidelines for every type of spalting, including laboratory-level spalting in just one hour.

Seri C. Robinson (Corvallis, Oregon) leads the Applied Mycology Lab, the Center for Spalting Research. A professor of wood anatomy at Oregon State University, Robinson is the coauthor of Spalted Wood: The History, Science, and Art of a Unique Material. www.northernspalting.com