Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Fun with Flowers

Emily's science experiment question for this year is "How does dye in the water affect the color of a white flower?" As you may have guessed, dye in the water affects the color of a white flower by turning it the color of the dye! There were visible results in her experiment within three hours. This picture was taken after four days (they've been the same for the last two days, so it appears they max out in color after about 48 hours).
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The exception to our conclusion (flowers turning the color of the dye in the water) would be in the instance of the two different purple dyes we tried. Both flowers turned BLUE, not purple. Your guess is as good as mine... The two "purple" flowers are in the very center of the bouquet; the big light blue one, and the one immediately to the right, which is a little darker and you can't see much of it.

We also split the stem of one flower and stuck the pieces into different colors of dyed water:
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I couldn't take a closer picture because the flash kept washing away the colors, and no flash was too dark. You can see a spot of bright yellow near my thumb joint, and then the left part of the flower is green, and the right part is blue.  The colors of the multi-color flower never got as vivid as they did in the non-split-stem flowers, but still pretty darn cool, if you ask me!!! The stems were too hard to split more than three times, but we REALLY wanted to figure out doing a rainbow flower.


Kaci said...

Awhhh science. =)

Betsy said...

That is so fun! I have started doing little science experiements with the girls. Gotta get them into it while they are young!


That's very cool! That was one of the topics we considered, but we decided on watering the same type of plant with different liquids. Hers is definitely prettier!