Step 8-1/2 A month later toddler and I actually found time to experiment a bit with the ink.

We (tbh, this has not been a fully 50/50 partnership..) unfortunately didn't have a fountain pen to play with so made stamps.

One from mushrooms, one from an #oak #gall and one birch leaf. We also used a pencil.

Results are interesting. With some fine tuning we got a VERY black, black. I suspect it might be extremely corrosive to the paper. We'll see. Looks super pretty and stains well.

#InkMaking

Step 7. One week later

Toddler and I just filtered the somewhat "fermented" ink-paste through a bit of cheese cloth.

This wasn't the most efficient process. Toddler helped.

We ended up with about 12 ml of ink. Looking at it it appears to have a good consistency and a nice deep black tone.

We'll try it out on some paper at a later time.

Notes for next time

-don't leave the metal cutlery standing in the paste for a week (as it's now etched..).

-grind the galls down much more

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Step 6. Extra info:

To be clear: this is about the most simple recipe that still creates viable ink. It requires late filtering, which is burdensome. Next time I'll boil out the oak tannins first.

Old books often refer to iron(II)sulfate as coppera or green vitra.

Together with the tannins from the oak galls the iron(II)sulfate creates a solution that when dried oxidises in black iron(III).

The gum arabic is a binder making it a nicer ink to write with. Doesn't do much once dry.

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Step 6. Wait a week or so. Stir every day.

Next week we'll add some water and then filter the ink.

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Step 5. Mix in the water. Stir it all down. This is a very satisfying step (especially when your jar is larger..).

Little video:

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Well. Time flies.. Anyway. Over a year later the #oak #galls dried nicely so the little Hobbit and I started the #ink making process.

First the ingredients. We're using a simple recipe and I base it on using 10 grams of galls.

1 - 4 grams of Iron(II) sulfate
2 - 4 grams of Gum arabic
3 - 30ml of water (from our well, boiled, no chemicals)
4 - 10grams of oak gall

#FunWithBalls #InkMaking

@colinpurrington I didn't know there was a Gall Week! That's so cool. Turns out I took pictures of galls anyway but it hadn't occured to me to put them on inaturalist. Thanks!

This might be of interest to #ink / #InkMaking and #dye / #NaturalDye people-- lots of us are out looking for galls this time of year for tannin reasons.