Calendula yellow

Calendula officinalis, pot marigold, is a beautiful little flower, sometimes called poor man's saffron.

I know one can make paint out of saffron, like I did here, so why not try Calendula?

 Read more about my Calendula experiment below!


I separated, to my eye, the most yellow and most orange petals of the plants I had grown through the summer of 2017. Then soaked 0.37g of each hue of them in sterilized baby jars in about 10g each of boiling water that had been Reverse Osmosis (RO) filtered.

My pictures of the process tell me that I separated the petals on the 17th of January then carried on with the experiment on the 20th. Yay for documenting the process with pictures and the date stamped picture technology! So, on Jan 20th, I poured it through clean cheese cloth into a clean jar and used gloved fingers to squeeze as much colored liquid from the bundle into the jar as I could. Then I set up fans circulating the air past the jars.

Again, from the picture data, I can see that I had squeezed it through the linen by 8:20:36am and the jars were dry by that evening at 6:33:38pm. Time stamping now seems a little creepy... oh well!

Once dried I made paint with 2 drops of distilled water and 1 drop of Winsor and Newton gum Arabic. The painted out yellows are here!