We’ve had a bumper grop of sloes this year. The fruit of the blackthorn (prunus spinosa) are bitter and the birds don’t eat them, so we make sloe gin with ours each year – and very yummy it is! Usually that uses up our small crop but as there were a few left over this autumn, I thought I’d have a go at making some ink with them.
There are a few sites suggesting that an indelible ink can be made from sloes. There are no instructions online as far as I can see, although there are lots of recipes as to how to make ink from fruit in general. I simmered the sloes in a saucepan with a teaspoon of alum and kept my fingers crossed that it would work!
Heating the sloes and mashing them with a potato masher released lots of juice. It also smelt deliciously jammy.
The resulting liquid was pinker than I expected, but a lovely colour for all that. So far, so good.
I stained the liquid through seives and muslin, added some thyme essential oil to stop it going mouldy and some gum arabic to both aid adhesion to the paper and ink flow. So what was the result?
A beautiful purple ink which works with both brush and dip pen.
I passed this through a coffee filter to get rid of smaller unwanted particles.
So, the big question – will it fade?
Well, so far so good. I’ve used this for a couple of months and it’s holding its colour well at the moment. It’s been fun to use over Christmas. Some inks change as the colours of the seasons change and this may be one of them. I don’t mind that too much – it’s all part of the joy of foraged art materials.