Making Ink at home from berries

Making ink at home from various different materials is actually very easy, here are the instructions to make ink from berries but you can make ink from many things, just do a search on the internet to see what else you can use.

What you will need:

Half a cup of ripe berries – if you are being really thrifty you could collect blackberries from the roadside when they are in season, but any berry will do.
Half a teaspoon of vinegar
Half a teaspoon of salt

A strainer
A bowl
A mixing spoon
A jam jar and lid

How to make the ink:

Fill the striner with your berries and hold it over the bowl, then using the back of your mixing spoon sieve the berries through the strainer so that the berry juice collects in the bowl, and discard the pulp.

Then add the salt and vinegar to the berry juice if the ink is too thick you can add a drop of water to thin it out.

Put it in a jam jar and keep airtight when not in use.

This is a very basic recipe there are more complicated ones to create different colours of dye.

So what can you use the ink for? Well I came up with the idea that you could get some old brown paper from Ikea that you get for free to wrap up crockery, cut out a potato stamp then use the dye on the potato stamp to make some nice wrapping paper, for free.

There are loads more money saving ideas on the forum come and have a look.