For a yellow colour.—Get six cents’ worth of saffron; put it into a bowl, and pour on cold water, in quantity according to the deepness or vividness of the tint that you wish. When it has infused sufficiently, pour off the liquid; and, in proportion to its quantity, add to it, carefully, four, five, or six drops of lemon-juice.
For green.—Buy, at a druggist’s, one ounce of French berries. Put a tea-spoonful of them into a common-sized tea-cup of boiling water. Cover it, and let it infuse half an hour or more. Then (having poured it off) add to the liquid (according to its quantity) about five or six drops of lemon-juice. This infusion of French berries makes a bright grass-green. To render it lighter, add some saffron yellow. To make it darker, put to it some blue from the blue saucer.
For a brown dye.—Infuse, in cold water, some pieces of bark from the white or black walnut tree; exposing it for several days to the sun and air, while it is soaking.
Crimson.—You may make a beautiful crimson for shading artificial flowers with a camel’s-hair pencil, by taking some of the fresh petals of the piony, when the flower is in full bloom. Lay them on a plate, and mash and press them with the back of a silver spoon, till you have extracted as much of their red juice as you want. To about twelve drops of the piony-juice, add one small drop of lemon-juice; and use the colour for shading the flowers, not for dyeing them.
For a bright red shading.—Press out, in the above manner, the juice of full-blown bergamot flowers; adding, also, (as above,) a drop of lemon-juice to brighten and set the colour.
Blue shading.—A beautiful blue shading can be obtained by pressing and mashing on a plate, the flower-leaves of the common blue flag or iris; adding, always, a very little lemon-juice. With this, and a camel’s-hair pencil, you can put the shades and streaks into blue flowers, whose first tint has been dyed from the blue saucer.
A mixture of crimson piony-juice, and blue flag-juice, will make a fine purple for shading.
When a little touch of dark brown or black is required for flowers, dip into water the end of a cake of umber, bistre, or indian ink, from a colour-box; rub the paint on a plate, and apply it with a camel’s-hair pencil.
All these dyes and shading colours for artificial flowers will (as we know) be found beautiful on trial. An exact knowledge of the precise proportions of the colouring materials cannot, however, be correctly obtained without a little practice.