This Fall, I teamed up with The Little Village for a multi-step craft project. We wanted to gather up all the black walnuts scattered on the ground throughout the farm and draw out their pigment to make our own ink.
First, the kids set out to pick up the walnuts. They filled a huge stockpot halfway with the greenish-brown orbs. Black walnuts are notoriously hard to shell, but that didn’t matter for us, since we weren’t trying to get to the nuts. We covered the walnuts with water and then left them for about 10 days to two weeks to ferment.
After the fermentation stage, the water had a distinct brown hue. I added a little water until the walnuts were completely covered, and then set it on the stove to heat. Once the concoction came to a boil, I turned the heat down and let it simmer all day; simmering the walnuts helped extract all of their pigment. It was a good thing it was a nice, warm day and I could open windows, because the smell of the cooking walnuts was quite strong...not exactly bad, but not exactly appetizing, either. When The Little Village kids came that afternoon, I tried to put a positive spin on the smell, but the kids were more blunt: “It smells like butts!”, they chorused, while pretending to retch in the corner. Really, it wasn’t THAT bad, but ventilation does help with this project.
The next stage is removing the walnuts from our mixture and squeezing them out to extract all the pigment. We used an old, clean hand towel for this. We had the kids wear plastic gloves for this part, so no one stained their hands, and miraculously, I don’t think anyone spilled ink on their clothes. The kids took turns holding the towel over the pot while I ladled walnuts into the towel, and then they squeezed all the liquid out. The liquid was starting to look more like ink, and less like disgusting soup, but there was one more smelly day ahead of us, because the ink had to be simmered again.
I simmered the ink on the stove for several hours, letting it cook down. I tested it every 30 minutes with a paintbrush and paper, to see how thick and dark it was getting. When it was a rich brown color, I turned the heat off and let it cool. When the kids arrived that day, we strained the ink through fine mesh to get rid of any remaining chunks. We poured our ink into little jars and pill bottles, leaving space at the top for our preservative. We wanted each bottle of ink to contain around 20% alcohol, because the alcohol acts as a preservative as well as helping the ink dry quickly on paper. We just eyeballed the amount in each bottle.
Because the ink had reduced so much in our enormous stock pot, I was worried we wouldn’t end up with enough ink. But I needn’t have worried; each kid got to take a bottle home, and there is enough left over for plenty of crafts! We’re thinking of homemade cards, wrapping paper, and stamps.
Have you ever made ink out of black walnuts, or anything else? Tell us about your experience in the comments!