A little about Erica…

Born and raised on Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska, she spent much of her formative years on the family’s commercial fishing boat, reluctantly providing child labor on their wooded acres, and building forts beneath a canopy of old growth Sitka Spruce trees. She is a 4th generation commercial fisherman and subsistence gardener.

Erica earned her Bachelor’s of Science in Human Communication with a minor in Women’s Studies from Southern Oregon University in 2006. After several years working in education and family advocacy, she decided to pursue a Master of Education in Community Counseling, graduating from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2012. At the same time she moved around the West Coast and Great Lakes while supporting her husband’s Coast Guard career. It was during this time that she began working in the Environmental Education field and found her calling as a naturalist.

The start of her natural dye journey using wild fungi began on a rainy September evening in Cordova, Alaska in 2010. It was at the LYS the Net Loft that she watched a VHS tape of Miriam Rice dyeing fiber with mushrooms in the late 70’s. However it wasn’t until 2018 when her family settled in Astoria, Oregon and began putting down roots that she was able to pursue dyeing as more than a hobby.

Erica lives on traditional lands of the Clatsop Chinook people. Her family homesteads on the outskirts of Astoria. After spending years sharing a small yard with two energetic children and a mostly-patient husband, she now stewards 20+ acres of forestland. After slowly rewinding her urban lawn through permaculture, surrounded her home in a native plant hedgerows, she is now thinning the understory and battling invasive blackberry vines. Erica grows primarily hardy vegetables, fodder for flock of spoiled chickens, and pollinator gardens of medicinal herbs and flowers to use for natural dye.