Dye from dried-out markers

i saw this idea at pane, amore e creatività more than two years ago and i really wanted to try it. but it took me a year to get around to it. and then it took me another year to blog about it. so don’t ask me too many questions because now i can’t really remember the details!!

this beautiful colored liquid is nothing other than a recycled dye made from the internal colored part of dried-up markers. basically, you test out all the markers in your house and put aside those that don’t draw anymore. they might be dried up for drawing, but not for all types of coloring! separate them by color and open them up. you put the color cylinder things inside alcohol in glass jars and after a few days you’ll have lovely colored dye to use all sorts of ways. when i only had a couple of one color (for example, i only had two reds), i cut them smaller to fit inside a little baby food jar and put in just a little alcohol. for all the details and some cool ideas on how to use it, see this bilingual post at rosi jo’, the inventor of this tecnique.

she used it to dye paper, thicker paper stock, couscous, salt, pasta and even a  starfish. i first tried it out with pasta. my daughter was home sick for a few days when we did this one year ago, so one day she decided how much pasta to do of each color. (how strange that wall behind her looks. now it’s covered with drawings!)

now, rereading rosi jo’s post, i was reminded that you can also dye twine with this. i always tie up my products that i sell with ribbon, but i thought it would be nice to use dyed twine instead. even though a year has gone by, i still have the jars with the dyes in them, so i just now put some plain twine in. we’ll see if it still works ok! i’ll let you know in the next post. in any case i still need to write about this technique because i did a few experiments with a different material. what do you think it is? and what other materials do you think could be dyed in this recycled way?