Corn Marigold Ink

Homemade Inks

29 Sept

I gathered some corn marigolds (I think that’s what they are!) from my lovely neighbours garden - another (equally lovely) neighbour had mentioned at a recent gathering there that you can get a lovely dye from these flowers so I thought I’d have a go at making an ink from them.

Corn marigold INK RECIPE

INGREDIENTS

Dried flower petals
Water
Gum Arabic
Clove

METHOD

Pick the petals from the flowers
Leave to dry over a few days
Add boiling water
Leave to steep over 3 days
Strained mixture through a coffee filter
Added a clove and 10 drops of gum arabic

I left the petals to dry in a sunny spot

I tried extracting colour by boiling / simmering half the petals (not dried) but I ended up burning them as I completely forgot about them on the stove and the water reduced to nothing.. I did do a test strip at 1 hour 45 mins and had a nice pale yellow colour, so I think this method could have produced a nice ink if I had managed to keep watch over it.

After leaving the rest of the petals to dry over 4 days I tried crushing them in a pestle and mortar, but there was no purchase to them and I thought crushing them seemed to be extracting their colour somewhat and leaving it stuck to the sides of the pestle / mortar (no idea which is which)

So I decided to try the simplest (read laziest) option which was to just soak the petals in boiling water

And leave them in a window for a few days

So after 3 days of steeping I could see the results were pretty much the same (the top strips are from when I was simmering the petals, before I forgot about them and burnt the mixture down to nothing)