Making Phoenician Dye

This activity came from The Story of the World Volume I Activity Guide and went along with our chapter on the Phoenicians.

 It's a very simple way to make dye, the other option involved purple cabbage and alum, neither of which we had on hand. We put two cups of frozen blueberries in a pot and set it on the stove to simmer for one hour. We made sure to stir occasionally to prevent it from burning to the bottom.

 Once the blueberries have cooked for one hour you end up with a purple goo of a semi liquid consistency. We used a strainer with a bowl underneath to collect the juice. I had to run some water through the goo in order to get the juice to drain out.

 Once we had a liquid we dumped in some macaroni noodles and let them soak for a few minutes until they started to take on the purple liquid.

I don't have pictures of the remaining steps but we drained the liquid and then dumped the macaroni on a piece of freezer paper to air dry. The next morning I could tell that it was going to take a long time to dry so I spread the noodles on a cookie sheet and put them in the oven on "warm" until they were dry to the touch. 

We'll be making necklaces using the noodles but I have to pick up some needles that the boys can use to push the string through. In hind site I would have chosen a pasta that has much bigger openings for this project, but I was using what we had on hand.