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Door ten / advent calendar | Guest editors blog
2012-12-10

Door ten / advent calendar

How to make dye from red cabbage:

Chop or grate the cabbage, then pestle it. Strain the juice from the pestled cabbage by wrapping it into a kitchen towel- and squeeze!

This "ink" can already be used for drawing or painting. However by adding active components you can create pinks and purples, blues and greens: Add acidy components as vinegar, lemon, slows for reds and pinks, whereas with adding alkali ingredients- salt, chalk, coal, egg white- you ll get blues to deep greens.

You can also cover a page with the original juice and then work on it with the "magical inks" described!

This is a recipe I learned about at the symposium "Arts and culture from the beginning!" in Dresden, Germany which I attended this October. Peter Reichenbach, visual artist and founder of the sevengardens project, shared some of his experiences. Originally driven from the personal endeavour to use natural paints instead of chemicals in his practice, the artist researched and collected old recipes - and, in the course of this process, found partnering museums and also primary schools. Together with children, the first "Färbergärten" - dye gardens- were created in the Rhein-Ruhr region. Meanwhile Peter s initiative grew into a global network where extracting plants to create dyes is the core activity of projects embracing education, sustainable development, biodiversity conservation and promotion of local economic cycles. So exiting!

www.sevengardens.eu