Vegetable Dyes

I helped with Rebecca’s class science fair project (she goes to a co-op preschool), and we did plant dyes. It was a lot of fun, I did a live drawing story, telling a story and drawing pictures at the same time, for the motivation, which I’d never done before. Thankfully it was an easy audience! Here is my story:

One day the kids in Miss Leslie’s class went to the farmers market, looked around at all the different tents selling all kinds of different fruits and vegetable, and bought a red cabbage, carrots, onions, and beets. Then on the way home at the top of a hill someone thought it should be their turn to carry the carrots, someone else thought it should be their turn to carry the onions, someone else thought it should be their turn to carry the beets, and there was a little disagreement about who should be carrying the cabbage. There was a little bit of tugging, someone bumped somebody, and the whole class rolled down the hill together with the vegetables. At the bottom they picked themselves up, and being sturdy 3&4 year olds no one was hurt. But someone noticed that there was orange all over their pants, someone had a green knee, someone was brown all over, someone’s shirt had a big red splot and one kid’s face had turned purple. Well, they wondered, where did all these colors come from? So they went back to the classroom and set out to find out.

And let me tell you, a jar of cabbage juice that has been unrefrigerated for a week smells awful!

We didn’t set the dyes with anything, we just juiced the vegetables, stuffed muslin in with the juice in jars and let it sit for a few days. In addition to the vegetables we also used dirt and grass, which the kids collected. What smells worse than a jar of old cabbage juice? An art rack full of hanging strips of muslin that have been marinating in old onion skins, beet juice and cabbage juice. It was raining outside, so the rack was drying inside. I’m glad I wasn’t working in the classroom that day, when I came to pick Rebecca up, wow did the room smell. But it was all for SCIENCE! Hmm.