A Very Pretty Experiment...

We love putting bursts of colour around our home. One of Phoebe's favourite past-times is wandering around the garden, cane flower basket over her arm, carefully holding her scissors by the blades, looking for just the right flowers for all of her arrangements. Little smiles pop up all over the house.
We had these 'surprise' Calla Lillies shoot up along the eastern side of our house, after re-locating a huge patch of Rhubarb, lest the painter trample it all, whilst painting our house. [we've finally decided on colours and have gone with a charcoal grey for the main timbers, a dirty white for all the window surrounds and other trims and a Brick Red roof - so still with that country solid strong colour and white demarcation - just not the verdant green I'd originally had in mind!!] Ok - so I digress...so the Calla Lillies artfully placed in the retro milk bottles and holder were looking pretty cool (well, we thought!).
And then an idea... 'cos they were kinda plain...let's add colour to the water!
SO the food colouring came out - with suitable protections in place for clothes, precious ancient terrazzo surface on kitchen bench, etc - and the experiment began.
What we did was create the 3 Primary colours straight and then the 3 Secondary colours from proportions of drops. Very simple, very effective - and a neat home school lesson for Phoebe where she made colour using particular numbers of drops. So we counted as she droppered the colours. Since the instructions on the food colouring packaging for how to create the secondary colours were in different proportions, I worked them out so we would get the same dilution. And then I thought of the extra lessons in the future - adding in the concept of proportion and eventually teach Phoebe how to do this herself. And then another time we could work the tonal concept of colour - with less and less number of drops for a weaker dilution, etc... We love home schooling - and it is still, technically, the school holidays - why oh why do we need a holiday from learning ;-) ?? It doesn't stop in our home!