(6/23/2026) I Have A Question.
With a mortar & a pestle, a binder, some water, and a pen / brush, what can i turn into something interesting on the page.
Can dirt ground up maintain its color / produce predictable results? Can flower petals dried out & ground up consistently be made into an interesting pigment? Can they make dyes? can you have dyed water And a ground pigment, for texture? Can different rocks / materials ground up grant different attributes? or will this just rot my paper?
I keep trying to research online, and I'm struggling to get the answers I'm looking for. I basically want to know if, with binder, can you turn pretty much anything into an "ink"? I wish I knew more about what could be ground up into a "pigment" and other natural pigments... I think I'm guessing that greys and some browns won't be difficult to achieve, but some colors will feel impossible. I also am wondering if i can even get the materials ground small enough to work with a dip pen, and if they'll stick to the page (will the binder help with that? or just dispersing it through the water?)
6/24/26 - Yesterday on a walk I picked some of the pinkest mountain laurel i could find (im not sure what makes them pinker or whiter, but most of the mountain laurel i saw was white) but I didn't get much, and when I got home and emptied my pockets into a container, i saw how little it really was. I wonder if they'll simply dry to brown, or if that is an effect of rot? I guess I'll have to wait and see... i got Six ticks for a handful of flowers.
Today I went in front of the house and picked Many flowers, putting them in a little container... I want to see if i can dehydrate them in the air fryer, so I dont have to spend so much time waiting for flowers to dry out.
Oh! I Also already ground up some of the hairy vetch flowers i had picked some days ago... They're currently a fine, cool-tinted grey powder, I want to see what the instructions say on the binder medium (gum arabic- i think the brand was called da vinci or something?) and see whatll happen if i just mix That with some binder...
Today I had picked, i Believe, some birds-foot trefoil (little yellow flowers on the ground, there were Many of these), some crown vetch, the petals off of some black-eyed susan flowers, henbit (?), and the flowers from red clover (ive been so nervous about ticks ive had to check myself multiple times since typing) and, as i said, i want to try to dehydrate them and just see how much color they retain... and if its Usable at all. I know some flowers make decent Dyes and i'll think about that at another point- right now i want to see what i can do with powders x binder.
6/25/2026
I slept restlessly last night, thinking about potential pigments and powders all night long. I feel like I can never get into an idea casually, I always have to enjoy it like Johnny Truant "enjoys" Zampanos work, with probable love and respect, but moreso driven by obsession. I have more flowers in the oven now. Its 4:42 AM. Drying out the flowers yesterday went well (although im doubtful i actually dried them Enough) and left me with some brittle, dry flowers I sorted into a tacklebox, for now. I don't have anything to store crushed up powder in, so this'll have to do for now. I need the binder to arrive! But the other thing I ordered arrives in Four More Days, and four days feels like an Eternity when I feel like the only thing tying me to this project is an interest in the question (Which i hardly know if i can Remember for four days) rather than any sort of actual obligation. One of the flowers, or maybe all of them together, smells quite pleasant and sweetly floral. I felt like I could smell it walking around outside. I feel like trying to do this is getting me more confident and comfortable walking out the door. Isn't it interesting that different plants smell pretty vastly different, and if you're familiar with smells, you can sort of know what you're coming up on before you see it? You know what pine trees smell like, right? (Do you? Have you ever been close to one?) You can sort of smell if there are a lot together, right? Kind of the same for flowers, I wondered what flower I was smelling on my walk. I wondered if other animals could differentiate grasses and such by smells, things I couldn't really even smell (did you know grasses grow a part called a "Spikelet" ? I Feel like that should be my name!) I wonder if they have any interest in telling what Rocks smell different (probably not as important to them as differentiating plants and animals, right?)
Jeez, I feel like that run-on writing style of Johnnys is rubbing off on me. I gotta finish that book so i can stop thinking about it.
My flowers are in the oven. I have a few more days to prepare for the arrival of binder, which I'll probably spend collecting more Things.. I have some dirt and rocks I want to try crushing up too... (i wish i had something to Put This Stuff In, especially a powder) but for now I'll have to endure another day with a Lot more questions than answers...
some dried flowers stored in the tacklebox. From left to right, red clover flowers, crown vetch flowers (with a hairy vetch or two and a henbit thrown in), lots of the birds foot trefoil (with a couple of petals from black-eyed susan), and then the pink mountain laurel (im so anxious about my dog eating this- should i be extra careful with grinding the poisonous plants too, probably?)
When opened, the tacklebox smells... Strange? A somewhat strong smell from all of the flowers and some of the like, offgassing or whatever from the new tacklebox.. It smells... Slightly, slightly familiar, like grazing across the edge of a memory.... It's not Sweet, and it Is something i would describe as floral (as well as smelling identifiably like... the stem? i think?), but... definitely in a different way than usual. I guess maybe thats the smell of dead flowers?
I put the ground up hairy vetch powder from the other day into a paper cup from the bathroom, for now. I wanted to try grinding up something else. I cleaned the pestle, and the blue i wiped off looked very interesting and gave me a little bit of hope (as of now I havent been driven by hope, moreso curiosity, i think), but the smell eminating from the towel is a little strange. What is that? Is that what dried out flowers smell like? It's so Strong, its so familiar and unfamiliar, i had to put the towel away from me while it dried... the smell is starting to upset my stomach (its 6:00 AM now, and I havent had breakfast yet... I considered going back to sleep for a bit once the flowers were done drying, i don't do well when i wake up too early... but i dont know if ill be able to rest yet) but i am curious to see the dried result.... I'm also glad i cleaned it off, cuz that feels like it was enough powder to discolor the next batch... I want to feel what the process is like for processing the flower heads into the more usable parts. Obviously I shouldnt just grind up the Entire head, especially for the ones i picked more carelessly, like the clovers and crown vetches. Not all of it is desireable plant material for what im doing... And some of them might be too laborious to work with to be worth even picking in the first place (this is my suspicion with red clover, thus why i picked less of it than the others... )
i spent some time sifting through the yellow flowers and picking off their petals, collecting them in the mortar. It is pretty labor intensive, but i hope being more discretionary with the plant material i put in will reduce the time i have to spend picking stuff back out... Even though i got less of the petals off of the susans, i have higher hopes for them right now :o i think bigger petals might be easier to work with...
*20 minute later correction. bigger petals are easier to Collect, they are not easier to Grind LOL
the grinding makes a nice sound. Especially when theres a bit of powder.
So it took a while to grind, and the resulting powder is Much more uniform looking than the vetch powder i had... I am already curious to try with the other vetch flowers i have, being more careful to only put petals in.
6/26/26 Yesterday, I went on another walk and got some more flowers and rocks. I noticed there were a Lot more rocks and minerals by the road that seemed useful than I thought there would be, so i resolved that I might come back today to try and get some more. Yesterday, after I got home, I spent a lot of time picking through the flowers i got and trying to crush them up into something. A lot of the flowers I picked are little clusters of small flowers, so they're pretty intensive to pick through and get some good petal material off of... Having to gently forage through the different parts of a vetch or trefoil, trying to pull off only the most pigmented parts of the petals, it's making me wish i got flowers with bigger petals. I wonder what crushing up rocks is gonna be like :S...
- i feel like the vetch powder is... drier, less clumpy and sticky than the yellow powder, from the trefoils and susans...
- Alright. I've crushed some rocks into sand and a few things: 1. One Rock makes much more sand than i had at first assumed. I don't need any large rocks at all LOL and 2. i also think i need a harder mortar + pestle, processing those definitely chewed mine up. With flowers, much of the time spent processing them comes from sorting through them and picking out the good plant material to use... With rocks, it's all grinding time.
- Wow! The mica is even more difficult to grind into a powder than the hard rocks (Probably at least in part due to the fact that i ground away the grooves in my mortar... oops) it feels like its taking sooo much longer to grind into a powder, and the lasting flakes Exist much longer than petals or large rocks, which are comparatively easy to target and break down. My wrists hurt! And Frankly, im not sure the powder is even retaining the quality i had hoped LOL im getting bamboozled by this rock!
7/5/26 - ive gone on a bunch more walks but not collected a lot more, or crushed anything. I have to move soon, and sort of suddenly, so I've been packing my powders up v_v ... i hope i can return to them soon, especially now that i finally have the binder (which btw doesnt have any instructions on it :o i assumed it would..) Some of the things have changed color already. The flower powders look a little browner already, not significantly so but ... I do think they are.
With a mortar & a pestle, a binder, some water, and a pen / brush, what can i turn into something interesting on the page.
Can dirt ground up maintain its color / produce predictable results? Can flower petals dried out & ground up consistently be made into an interesting pigment? Can they make dyes? can you have dyed water And a ground pigment, for texture? Can different rocks / materials ground up grant different attributes? or will this just rot my paper?
I keep trying to research online, and I'm struggling to get the answers I'm looking for. I basically want to know if, with binder, can you turn pretty much anything into an "ink"? I wish I knew more about what could be ground up into a "pigment" and other natural pigments... I think I'm guessing that greys and some browns won't be difficult to achieve, but some colors will feel impossible. I also am wondering if i can even get the materials ground small enough to work with a dip pen, and if they'll stick to the page (will the binder help with that? or just dispersing it through the water?)
6/24/26 - Yesterday on a walk I picked some of the pinkest mountain laurel i could find (im not sure what makes them pinker or whiter, but most of the mountain laurel i saw was white) but I didn't get much, and when I got home and emptied my pockets into a container, i saw how little it really was. I wonder if they'll simply dry to brown, or if that is an effect of rot? I guess I'll have to wait and see... i got Six ticks for a handful of flowers.
Today I went in front of the house and picked Many flowers, putting them in a little container... I want to see if i can dehydrate them in the air fryer, so I dont have to spend so much time waiting for flowers to dry out.
Oh! I Also already ground up some of the hairy vetch flowers i had picked some days ago... They're currently a fine, cool-tinted grey powder, I want to see what the instructions say on the binder medium (gum arabic- i think the brand was called da vinci or something?) and see whatll happen if i just mix That with some binder...
Today I had picked, i Believe, some birds-foot trefoil (little yellow flowers on the ground, there were Many of these), some crown vetch, the petals off of some black-eyed susan flowers, henbit (?), and the flowers from red clover (ive been so nervous about ticks ive had to check myself multiple times since typing) and, as i said, i want to try to dehydrate them and just see how much color they retain... and if its Usable at all. I know some flowers make decent Dyes and i'll think about that at another point- right now i want to see what i can do with powders x binder.
6/25/2026
I slept restlessly last night, thinking about potential pigments and powders all night long. I feel like I can never get into an idea casually, I always have to enjoy it like Johnny Truant "enjoys" Zampanos work, with probable love and respect, but moreso driven by obsession. I have more flowers in the oven now. Its 4:42 AM. Drying out the flowers yesterday went well (although im doubtful i actually dried them Enough) and left me with some brittle, dry flowers I sorted into a tacklebox, for now. I don't have anything to store crushed up powder in, so this'll have to do for now. I need the binder to arrive! But the other thing I ordered arrives in Four More Days, and four days feels like an Eternity when I feel like the only thing tying me to this project is an interest in the question (Which i hardly know if i can Remember for four days) rather than any sort of actual obligation. One of the flowers, or maybe all of them together, smells quite pleasant and sweetly floral. I felt like I could smell it walking around outside. I feel like trying to do this is getting me more confident and comfortable walking out the door. Isn't it interesting that different plants smell pretty vastly different, and if you're familiar with smells, you can sort of know what you're coming up on before you see it? You know what pine trees smell like, right? (Do you? Have you ever been close to one?) You can sort of smell if there are a lot together, right? Kind of the same for flowers, I wondered what flower I was smelling on my walk. I wondered if other animals could differentiate grasses and such by smells, things I couldn't really even smell (did you know grasses grow a part called a "Spikelet" ? I Feel like that should be my name!) I wonder if they have any interest in telling what Rocks smell different (probably not as important to them as differentiating plants and animals, right?)
Jeez, I feel like that run-on writing style of Johnnys is rubbing off on me. I gotta finish that book so i can stop thinking about it.
My flowers are in the oven. I have a few more days to prepare for the arrival of binder, which I'll probably spend collecting more Things.. I have some dirt and rocks I want to try crushing up too... (i wish i had something to Put This Stuff In, especially a powder) but for now I'll have to endure another day with a Lot more questions than answers...
some dried flowers stored in the tacklebox. From left to right, red clover flowers, crown vetch flowers (with a hairy vetch or two and a henbit thrown in), lots of the birds foot trefoil (with a couple of petals from black-eyed susan), and then the pink mountain laurel (im so anxious about my dog eating this- should i be extra careful with grinding the poisonous plants too, probably?)
When opened, the tacklebox smells... Strange? A somewhat strong smell from all of the flowers and some of the like, offgassing or whatever from the new tacklebox.. It smells... Slightly, slightly familiar, like grazing across the edge of a memory.... It's not Sweet, and it Is something i would describe as floral (as well as smelling identifiably like... the stem? i think?), but... definitely in a different way than usual. I guess maybe thats the smell of dead flowers?
I put the ground up hairy vetch powder from the other day into a paper cup from the bathroom, for now. I wanted to try grinding up something else. I cleaned the pestle, and the blue i wiped off looked very interesting and gave me a little bit of hope (as of now I havent been driven by hope, moreso curiosity, i think), but the smell eminating from the towel is a little strange. What is that? Is that what dried out flowers smell like? It's so Strong, its so familiar and unfamiliar, i had to put the towel away from me while it dried... the smell is starting to upset my stomach (its 6:00 AM now, and I havent had breakfast yet... I considered going back to sleep for a bit once the flowers were done drying, i don't do well when i wake up too early... but i dont know if ill be able to rest yet) but i am curious to see the dried result.... I'm also glad i cleaned it off, cuz that feels like it was enough powder to discolor the next batch... I want to feel what the process is like for processing the flower heads into the more usable parts. Obviously I shouldnt just grind up the Entire head, especially for the ones i picked more carelessly, like the clovers and crown vetches. Not all of it is desireable plant material for what im doing... And some of them might be too laborious to work with to be worth even picking in the first place (this is my suspicion with red clover, thus why i picked less of it than the others... )
i spent some time sifting through the yellow flowers and picking off their petals, collecting them in the mortar. It is pretty labor intensive, but i hope being more discretionary with the plant material i put in will reduce the time i have to spend picking stuff back out... Even though i got less of the petals off of the susans, i have higher hopes for them right now :o i think bigger petals might be easier to work with...
*20 minute later correction. bigger petals are easier to Collect, they are not easier to Grind LOL
the grinding makes a nice sound. Especially when theres a bit of powder.
So it took a while to grind, and the resulting powder is Much more uniform looking than the vetch powder i had... I am already curious to try with the other vetch flowers i have, being more careful to only put petals in.
6/26/26 Yesterday, I went on another walk and got some more flowers and rocks. I noticed there were a Lot more rocks and minerals by the road that seemed useful than I thought there would be, so i resolved that I might come back today to try and get some more. Yesterday, after I got home, I spent a lot of time picking through the flowers i got and trying to crush them up into something. A lot of the flowers I picked are little clusters of small flowers, so they're pretty intensive to pick through and get some good petal material off of... Having to gently forage through the different parts of a vetch or trefoil, trying to pull off only the most pigmented parts of the petals, it's making me wish i got flowers with bigger petals. I wonder what crushing up rocks is gonna be like :S...
- i feel like the vetch powder is... drier, less clumpy and sticky than the yellow powder, from the trefoils and susans...
- Alright. I've crushed some rocks into sand and a few things: 1. One Rock makes much more sand than i had at first assumed. I don't need any large rocks at all LOL and 2. i also think i need a harder mortar + pestle, processing those definitely chewed mine up. With flowers, much of the time spent processing them comes from sorting through them and picking out the good plant material to use... With rocks, it's all grinding time.
- Wow! The mica is even more difficult to grind into a powder than the hard rocks (Probably at least in part due to the fact that i ground away the grooves in my mortar... oops) it feels like its taking sooo much longer to grind into a powder, and the lasting flakes Exist much longer than petals or large rocks, which are comparatively easy to target and break down. My wrists hurt! And Frankly, im not sure the powder is even retaining the quality i had hoped LOL im getting bamboozled by this rock!
7/5/26 - ive gone on a bunch more walks but not collected a lot more, or crushed anything. I have to move soon, and sort of suddenly, so I've been packing my powders up v_v ... i hope i can return to them soon, especially now that i finally have the binder (which btw doesnt have any instructions on it :o i assumed it would..) Some of the things have changed color already. The flower powders look a little browner already, not significantly so but ... I do think they are.