Rainbow Flowers
With spring just around the corner, at least that’s what the calendar says but with 5 feet snow banks it might be awhile for us. But to brighten your house up make up these fun rainbow flowers. They are super pretty and a fun experiment to do with the kids.
Buy 6 white flowers - we bought carnations but roses and I’m sure other flowers would work too. I put our flowers in these tall 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!). Then the girls added at least 20 drops of liquid 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. In the past 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.
