I stumbled upon this design today. This chair is a solid piece of mycelium that has been grown into the wooden legs. The seat rested on the mold with the outside edge completely exposed. This is the best image I could include since the images on the main post are protected, but you can find more here.
If I do end up making a mycelium and bamboo chair, a design similar to this seems like a possibility. This particular chair is just mid-century inspired, but the shapes of the wood component should be fairly simple to CNC mill, and I could grow two squares of mycelium instead of the cushions, which would only require a simple mold.
Other views of this exact chair can be found here.
Today I tried to bake the mycelium test pieces that have been air drying for 2 days. The pieces are supposed to be baked at 200 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes, and they are supposed to end up about a third of their original mass.
When I checked on the pieces before baking them, I noticed that some had started to yellow or turn brown around the edges. I’m not sure what caused that, but it isn’t too noticeable (the planter is not white because it was in a mold, so the color on it is from the crop waste itself. I could have let it grow in a bag for a few days to turn fully white, but I didn’t).
It didn’t go ask I planned. I ended up baking some of the pieces for an hour, and the rest for the 30 minutes, but none of them are fully dry. One piece was even damp to the touch after baking. I’m going to air dry them for another day or two, then I will bake them again. Hopefully it will work.
Today I removed the mycelium test pieces from their molds and set them out to dry. Removing the planter proved extremely difficult until I realized that hitting the mold with a mallet in the same spot over and over would release the opposite side, and I had previously been rotating the piece around.
I weighed each piece to determine their wet mass, that way I will be able to weigh them again once they have dried to make sure they are about a third of their original weight, meaning that they are fully dry.
The piece need to dry in open air for 1 or 2 days before I can put them in the oven. And once I do, I will be able to see how the final piece turned out.
Krown Designs sells mycelium supplies in Europe, as well as selling their own mycelium furniture, lamps, and accessories.
This video showcases a 3d printed chair that was made using PLA (polylactic acid), a bioplastic, that they 3d printed in hollow pieces and filled with mycelium. They did not kill the fungus, so the mycelium strengthened the piece and continued to grow, resulting in the formation of mushrooms.
I found this architecture dissertation project where the student tried making the mycelium mixture. They ended up purchasing it, and used a plastic IKEA chair as a mold to grow a chair fully out of mycelium. Since it was just dried out, the fungus is not dead, so if it gets wet mushrooms might sprout.
The student has a full write up available here
