Ink Foraging In Central Park

[Mardi13]

I though some folks might be interested in this recent article in the New Yorker magazine about foraging for natural ingredients to make ink, in the heart of NYC.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/ink-foraging-in-central-park?mbid=social_facebook&fbclid=IwAR0_kEn1prxR7zTfLwdkwUEX25ylYFiyeNV1LF2WKeavWhtRv22kaG8ucIc

[OCArt]

Thanks for posting, I enjoyed the read.

[inkstainedruth]

Fascinating article. I know that a lot of common plants make excellent natural dyes for fabric (I saw some examples once of a purplish dye made from lichens), but hadn't really thought about them for making ink. I'm wondering now if the iron gall is used as a mordant (a mordant fixes the dye to make it more permanent; using different mordants can change the final color of a dye). Some colors are easy to make with natural dyes (a lot of plants yield yellow, for instance) but others aren't (green is particularly tough and tends to have to be done with overdying blue over yellow.

Also now wondering if you could make an ink out of woad or indigo, which I once saw done at, IIRC,Old Surbridge Village, a historic site in Massachusetts where they moved buildings from various places in New England to recreate a "typical" 19th century New England community, and which has costumed docents demonstrating different aspects of American life (the time period they're doing is approximately the 1830s).

Thanks for posting the link.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[lapis]

I remember my second last mother-in-law telling me this. Even after WWII she/they still used to make their own Thuringia dumplings like they had done for centuries. As soon as the potatoes were rasped, they would be wrung out in a large towel to get rid of as much starch as possible. They kept that pressed-out liquid -- like everything else; they never threw anything away -- because they would then be able to use it as a dye for any clothes they would have sewn or knitted. That colour was a deep purple (so she said) arising after a long oxidation in an open pail down in the basement. Now the only reason I'm mentioning this is that that -- like any plant exudates pinched out of Central Park -- may all be true, especially for creating a dye to colour goods in bulk, but, I still can't imagine that being of any use for a FP ink unless that liquid was then concentrated at least down to one hundredth the volume.

 

Whew