A blackberry dye recipe that
produces a lovely burgundy pink coloured playdough and helps to use up the
berry bits 'n pieces left over from cooking crumbles, pies and blending smoothies.
Yum!
Blackberries
and their juice are infamous for the ability to stain pretty much everything!
Their wild availability makes them a most interesting natural dye, with the
entire process being one that children can take part in from start to finish
- picking plump ripe berries from thickets of prickly brambles to rolling
out mounds of scented dough, cuting out shapes and collaging patterns. The
cooking process seals in the pigments sothere are fewer red hands to look
out for, however everything leading upto that point is as you'd expect, at
risk from some serious deep red splatterings!
With it currently being mid-August, now until mid-September is the perfect
time to pick berries from the UK's verges, hedgerows, and the garden. Sadly,
or not, we were beaten to the few wild stems at the bottom of our garden byan
abundance of slugs and snail slime so ventured out with a couple of emptytubs
to fill them from the side of a local pedestrian/cycle path. And theventure
out was well worth it, the treat was a canopy of blossom, berries, and bees,
and the odd stinging nettle or two!
Wash your bounty of fruits thoroughly so that any creature crawlies canbe
rescued and returned outdoors. Then blend 70g of berries with 100ml of water.
Strain carefully through a muslin cloth, squeezing the mulch gently to separte
the liquid. Measure and if necessary make it up to 120ml. Freeze unused
blackberries for use later in the year.
Blackberry playdough recipe
- 150g plain flour
- 120g salt
- 120g dye liquid
- 1 tablespoon oil
- 1 tbsp cream of tartar
- Hand moisturiser (optional)
Place all the ingredients except the hand lotion
into a saucepan and cook over a medium heat until everything comes together
in a ball. Leave it to cool and then knead until smooth.
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Add a few spoonfuls of hand cream and enjoy the tactile squelchiness
as the two combine into a soft pliable dough.
Garden blackberries are the pickable fruit that kids outdoor kitchens could
have been made for! Collect and squash any number of berries, add a little
water and pour the mix into a bowl containing a beaker full of flour + 1/2
beaker of salt. Stir, knead and play .
Making natural dyes from plants
Grass dye
Rosehip dye
Blackberry
Elderberry
Blueberry
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Spinach
Carrot
Red cabbage
Raspberries
Onion skin dye
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| More playdough recipes |
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