Wednesday, April 11, 2012

An Experiment

WARNING: Lots of pictures of randomly coloured flowers, because they make me smile and I can't choose which ones I want to show you.

And with the warning out the way on to the experiment.....

I found this gorgeous pic of rainbow roses on Pinterest the other day, and of course being a lover of all things brightly coloured I felt the need to try out my own version of some rainbow flowers with D and M, so yesterday we visited the local florist and came home armed with a gorgeous big bunch of white daisies and a refreshed supply of food colouring.

We began by getting out my big glass IKEA Vase and six random small vessels, six shot glasses would have been perfect, but alas I have no idea where luke has put the 50 (!) or so we own (mental note, must ask him about that!), so we ended up with two shot glasses, two espresso cups, a tiny stine shaped glass and a pony glass, my usual mismatched style. We put a little water in each glass and then quite heavy handedly added food colouring to each one. We went the the spectrum, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. We then placed these individual vessels into the base of the big vase.



Next we chopped a little off the end of each stem (we could have done more!) and split several of the stems in two for a short distance and then placed each stem or half of into a different colour water/food colouring mixture. The big vase helped all the flowers to stand up nicely.



Within an hour you could see a little colour coming out into some of the daisies.


By this morning we had lots of beautiful daisies with brightly coloured centers, stems and leaves.



We found that the green, red and blue colourings worked the best, but the whole effect was quite delightful. We even found that on one of the bunches where we had split the stem at the base into two and placed one half in yellow and the other half in red, that we actually had a half yellow, half red flower.


Over all, it was super easy, lots of fun and a great way for the girls to learn about plants..... plus I have this unreal bunch of flowers now!

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