These mushrooms look real enough to eat
Darkness is blanketing the yard around the garage but inside the lights are burning bright. At 4 a.m. each day you can find Ken Anderson, fueled by coffee, sitting in a wooden chair in front of his cluttered workbench. Wood shavings fly as he whittles away at a curved branch of corkscrew willow. Minutes later the telltale shape of a morel mushroom top emerges.
“I let the wood speak to me,” says Ken. “Mushrooms aren’t straight, so I like to follow the curves of the wood.”
Some mornings Ken knocks out five or six basic mushroom shapes. He uses an old kitchen knife for this first round of carving. “I’m old, so how many I do depends on how many times I have to stop due to my arthritis,” he says.
After an hour the stick has a roughly shaped morel mushroom cap. Some mornings Ken knocks out five or six basic mushroom shapes. That initial hour of carving with an old kitchen knife is followed by multiple hours of tedious grinding with a Dremel tool to create the ridges and holes of a morel’s signature honeycomb top.
For more than five decades, Ken has been hunting real morels in the woods near his family’s property in Bethany. Nine years ago, he started carving replicas of the coveted mushrooms from wood and antlers.
“Every time I carved one, somebody wanted to buy it,” says the Grundy Electric Cooperative member. “An average-sized one of 2 1/2 to 3 inches takes about 3 1/2 hours to carve. Big ones can take up to seven hours. I have 980 pictures on Pinterest of mushrooms that I go through for inspiration.”
Ken spent his career as a tile contractor leading high-end home remodels. Now that he’s mostly retired his tools are used to create mushroom carvings. Ken uses a professional Dremel tool with a variety of bits normally used for tile or dental work.
“I bought about 30 different kinds of bits and just played around with them,” Ken says. “I bought so many bits from a dental supply company they sent me a flyer for a dental chair.”
Several years ago, Ken’s cousin had a corkscrew willow die and asked Ken to help take it down. In return, Ken was rewarded with the lumber. For the past eight years he has used it for his morel carvings and is dreading the day he runs out of the unique wood with natural curves. He’s also carved mushrooms from basswood and cottonwood.
“I just don’t want straight limbs, because I don’t want to carve straight morels,” he says. “Morels always have some curve to them. I’ve never found a perfect morel in my life. I like finding and carving the big, gnarly ones. I’m always afraid I’m going to make a pattern with the holes, but there is no right or wrong.”
To achieve high levels of detail on his wooden morels, Ken switches between nine professional Dremel bits. Depending on the size, he can spend up to two hours carving a morel’s signature honeycomb top.
After Ken carves the mushroom, he colors the top with an oil-based dye, which takes about a week to air-dry. Then he adds a clear coat of satin finish.
Ken’s pieces of art span freestanding carvings, knives, walking sticks, wine stoppers and more. He sells some in small glass boxes or vials. The mushrooms that are a few inches tall cost around $35, with larger ones costing more.
In previous years, Ken sold his carvings at local farmers markets but has since switched to online sales. When he carves, he takes photos and videos to show the process, which he posts to his Facebook and Instagram accounts. He loves to do custom projects. For example, a customer from Illinois sent him several photos and exact measurements of a real mushroom so Ken could carve a replica.
Each step of the process makes the mushroom look more realistic. For the mushroom on the right, Ken has colored the top with dye and carved the stem to resemble a freshly picked morel.
While Ken has spent decades in the woods hunting for morels, he admits he doesn’t have any secrets for finding them. But he’d be happy to carve you one that will last much longer.
To see more of Ken’s work, search for Hand Carved Morels on Facebook and Instagram. You can call him at 660-528-0095.
“I let the wood speak to me,” says Ken. “Mushrooms aren’t straight, so I like to follow the curves of the wood.”