Making DIY Ink

Ever since I heard that it is possible to make ink from natural substances, I wanted to try it with my children. Yesterday Tyler triumphantly brought me pokeberry ink that was nearly ready to be used. He had pounded the berries with his mortar and pestle (plastic cup and a stick). I strained the liquid and mixed in vinegar and salt to preserve the color. 

Today in the children's creative journals, I assigned the children to write a message using a quill and pokeberry ink. 

But if one color is good, more is better, right?

We looked for things in nature that stain your fingers. Walnuts. Leaves. Flowers. 

To get green ink, I collected a wad of green leaves and blended them with a little bit of water. Walnuts shells needed to be boiled for 15 minutes, as did the vinca petals. Once I had highly colored liquid, I added salt and vinegar to each color, which supposedly preserves the color. 

Boiling yellow mum petals failed to make yellow ink, but I remembered reading about turmeric being a good choice. I ran out of time and patience in waiting for the turmeric to fully dissolve in water, so we used it prematurely. If we were going to paint canvases to sell, I would have wanted to find a way to have my yellow less watery.

But the yellow paint worked fine for our purposes. We used the quill to do smaller spaces, words, or outlines and brushes for everything else.

Maybe someday I'll experiment with more kinds of berries, onion peels, dirt, chili powder, and purple cabbage. I'd also like to try mixing paint colors to see the new combinations we can come up with. But for now, my desire to make natural ink is fully satisfied. 

Curing Destination Disease

Ever travel with a person stricken by Destination Disease? If you have, you know what it is like. No unnecessary breaks. No avoidable waypoints. No relaxed meals. Just get in the car and drive with bug-eyed determination to your destination. 

Steve Gilliland, a motivational speaker, calls that hammer-down traveling style the Destination Disease. Unfortunately, John and I have been guilty of that, at least to some degree. Grandparents live a day's drive away which means we start driving in the morning and muscle through boredom and travel-weariness by watching mile markers slip by the windows. The sooner we get there, the sooner we can start having fun. This past weekend, though, we decided to take Gilliland's advice and enjoy the ride. 

We broke up an 11-hour drive by stopping at the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, Virginia. 

Each house, with exception to the West African replica, comes from the country it represents. The buildings were torn apart in their native homelands, their bricks numbered and marked for correct position and orientation, and the buildings were reassembled at the museum. For my LEGO-loving children, this sounded like the biggest LEGO challenge ever. Each house represented the kinds of homes the early American immigrants would have had (or desired to have) in their homeland. 

English house in the 1600's

One room of the English house

Irish farm from the 1700s

Many of the stops had friendly, informed volunteers who told us about the era and answered our questions.

A German man cooked era-appropriate food in the
German kitchen. He apologized for not being able to share 
the food with us. The best he could do, he said, was to let us smell his
breath after he finished eating, if we were interested. We weren't.

The tinsmith

One of the favorite stops for all of us was the African compound, probably because we could easily imagine we were back in Ghana. We recognized the woven fish trap (hanging beside the pole on the left side of the picture), the food, the gourds. They even had bamboo and banana plants growing nearby. 

But best of all was the family time. To humor our ride-loving threesome, we rented a golf cart instead of walking two miles around the premises. Walking would have made the most sense, considering we were breaking up a road trip, but the fun of a golf cart easily offset the missed exercise. We drove from one house to the next, happy to be together on a stunning September day.

Waiting in the shadows for the forge's volunteer
to return from his lunch break

Our success in breaking up the journey to South Carolina with the museum and a hotel for the night made us appreciate Steve Gilliland's advice to enjoy the ride.

With that insight freshly impressed upon us, John and I asked the children if they'd like to stop for the night to break up the 11-hour drive home. But anticipating a school holiday the next day, they opted to drive hammer-down with bug-eyed determination through travel weariness and boredom and get home yet that night. 

We humored them. I suppose this means none of us are completely cured of Destination Disease.  

But perhaps we are on the road to recovery. When we only had a few hours to go, our youngest said, "Mommy, I need to snuggle with you." The van needed fuel anyway, so we stopped and fueled up, then sat in the parking lot an extra ten minutes for no better reason than to let the youngest snuggle with his best mommy.

I call that enjoying the ride.

The License Plate Map

Starting point: Lancaster County, PA

Destination: Greenwood, SC 

Our maps app said it would take 9 hours and 52 minutes to drive that distance. But if you add in the inevitable road construction and the child who needs to visit rest stops with shocking regularity and occasional meals to stave off starvation, ten hours wasn't going to get us to the wedding in Greenwood. I knew we would need something to entertain the children along the way. 

We have Scribd, that wonderous library of audiobooks which we listened to by the hour. And we have an endless store of music that we listened to or sang with.

But my stroke of genius was taking along a blank map of the US so we could color in the State of each license plate we saw. John was already locking the house door when I decided to print one, so I begged his pardon and dashed back to the school room long enough to print a blank map. At first there were many spaces to color. But as the trip wore on, coloring in the spaces of much-needed states gave the same rush as fitting in the last pieces of a puzzle. For a long time, Kentucky and Vermont were the only two we needed to finish coloring the eastern half of the US. We dearly wanted them.

I suggested to John that he drive through a rest stop solely so we could read the license plates on the semis. He humored me, but just when we slowed on the ramp of the rest area, the child-with-the-mouse-like-bladder needed to go potty which meant we parked with the cars instead of driving through the corridor of trucks.

Even without a nest of truck plates to aid us, we saw a car from Kentucky in South Carolina and a Vermont tag in Pennsylvania after dark, less than two hours from home. The children were sleeping, so I colored in Vermont with deep satisfaction. 

Our map at the end of our trip

If you want to use this idea, I suggest you consider: 

1. a map for each child. We had one map and while it made the game a fun family event, it also created the question of who gets to color in the spaces. With only two children who wanted the pleasure, it was easily resolved, but larger families might run into larger issues with this.

2. a blank map instead of a labeled one. If I had thought of this fast enough, my children would have honed their map skills along the way. 

3. a map with Canadian provinces as well. After we saw a plate for the third province, I drew them onto the map and hoped no Canadian or cartographer would look at my sketches too closely.

4. coloring each state every time to you see it. This would make commonly seen states dark and infrequent ones much lighter. We considered coming up with a plan for this, but decided against it lest we wear holes in the page for the states we traveled through. But I still think it would add interest to the map of an older child. Color the state black after seeing it ten times, if you don't mind keeping score. 

All told, the map was great entertainment. Even for the mom.