Rainbow Flowers

Since this is the last week before school starts up again, we’ve been trying to cram in as many cool projects as possible - activities from the “summer to-do list” that the girls and I created back in June, but haven’t had a chance to get to yet.

I saw these rainbow flowers on Pinterest from Paint Cut Paste and thought they looked awesome. Lilo saw the post too, and agreed that we should try it. So on Monday, as we were walking home from the kids getting hair cuts, I picked up 6 white carnations at the local flower shop. At home, I put them in our Vodka glasses (a wedding gift from 11 years ago - I think I’ve used them for flowers more then vodka, but I still love them!). The girls added at least 20 drops of neon-coloured food colouring to the water in each vase to create very vibrant red, lime green, blue, and purple colours. For the other 2 flowers I used gel dyes in a yellow and violet.

In a few hours we could already see results and overnight they were very bright. It’s interesting how some of the colours worked better then others.

The blue worked the fastest. The green was the brightest (Isla did empty the bottle of dye in it so that might be the reason) and the purples didn’t really work.

The violet from the gel dye made the tips blue and not very bright. And the purple food colouring flower almost looks black - weird. I’m wondering if it has something to do with blended colours (secondary colours) and the colours splitting when they absorb. Early this summer we did an experiment with markers on strips of paper towels dipped in water and you could see the secondary colours separate when they bleed.

It was a fun experiment and now we have pretty rainbow coloured flowers in our kitchen. A few days after these photos where taken, the green flower is now completely green, the violet flower tips are more blue but still pretty white and the dark purple is starting to look like a purply black.

On Color Me Katie blog she did rainbow flowers too but 4 colours in one flower. She split the steam in 4 and put each section in a different colour to make one flower have 4 colours - too bad we didn’t see that early, that would have been fun to try.

Next time you get some white flowers try adding some food colour to the water to see what you can create.