I Made Ink from Pokeberries
NATURE OBSERVATION
You can now buy printed reproductions of my hand-painted watercolor and ink Nature Observation Journals on Amazon!
I bought a beautiful book several weeks ago that combines three of my favorite things: foraging, DIY and art supplies.
It's a foragers guide to natural ink making, and it's a beautiful piece of art, itself.
I bought the book at the perfect time, as pokeberries were just coming in to season and their particular ink is one of the most dramatic recipes it contains.
Pokeweed grows everywhere in the region I'm in. The berries themselves look delicious, but they’re actually considered toxic, so you can’t eat them. But you can make gorgeous bright pink ink with them!
I have a bunch of pokeweed growing on the hill behind my house, so I decided to venture down there one morning a few weeks ago to gather some berries.
The idea of starting my morning collecting berries sounded so lovely, and a bit fairytale like, but the reality was a little intense.
I started picking them by hand and then quickly realized that it was going to be very messy and take me 100 years to finish, so I decided to start cutting them down by the cluster.
I also just so happened to be swimming through a sea of poison ivy and blackberry vines, while being eaten by 10,897 mosquitoes, so I didn't really want to take any more time than necessary with that task.
By the way, I was whacked across the face by one of these thorny vines. I never expected to need safety goggles while foraging.
I did see a really cool praying mantis though! That was fun!
I started mashing up the first batch in the kitchen and I quickly realized that was a bad idea when all of the little toxic berry seeds started jumping everywhere. I immediately stopped, cleaned up every inch of the floor and countertop and then moved the operation outside.
Once I was outside I handpicked the good berries off the clusters, because there were quite a few rotten ones on there and then I mushed everything together with a potato masher.
After everything was well mushed, I poured the berry mush through a fine mesh strainer and then attempted to further strain it through a coffee filter, but as I wasn't getting much out of that, so I decided to give it up and go with the thicker ink.
Once I had my ink sorted out, I sat down and tested it out by painting a quick artistic representation of a pokeberry cluster.
What a fun and satisfying project that was! I'm officially obsessed with making natural inks.
Speaking of painting, over the past several weeks, I’ve been hand painting nature observation journals to sell online!
The journals themselves are printed reproductions of my artwork, but I'm pretty impressed with the print quality!
I’m selling them through Amazon KDP, but I have links to the collection here on my website. I’ll be sharing more about my journey with nature observation journaling in my next video. I've been getting a lot of enjoyment out of it.
Hi, I’m Kristen!
I envision a world where you and I rediscover what it is to be human, through connection with ourselves, each other and the natural world around us.