Adding droplets of dye to water and setting white flowers in to absorb the colorful liquid is the most awesomely fun thing to do with kids or adults. It makes for a great science experiment, art project, biology lesson, and is just plain fun.
The science term for how this works is called transpiration, where water is pulled up through the flower’s stem toward the petals in little vessels or tubes called xylem. You color the water, the flower absorbs the color with it.
All you need are:
- glass tubes, small glasses from your kitchen cupboard, or small vases
- Water
- liquid dye
- white flowers. Daisies are the popular choice, but (as you can see in the pictures), I used tulips with great success
For, roughly, every 1/2 – 1 cup of water, use 20-30 drops of liquid dye. This is a great way to practice counting if your child is young. Within a few minutes to an hour, you should start noticing the flowers changing.
This picture was only after a few minutes. I was pretty shocked to see the tulips changing so quickly. They really absorbed the colors fast.
For the adventurous, you can split the stems in half. Stick one half in one tube/glass and the other half in a differently dyed tube/glass. That gives a cool tie-dyed affect.
We had fun experimenting with the colors. We did blue, red, and green with great success. Purple (mixing blue and red) didn’t seem to absorb the color as well, and seemed very blue heavy. It was still beautiful, though. See the middle picture:
What was very interesting was when my daughter decided to mix all three colors (red, blue, and yellow) together. The flowers really didn’t seem to like that.
This is after a full day!