Iron gall ink is prepared by adding iron salts to tannic acids that from oak galls. These are pictures of bleaching process of pin oak galls that gathered from our trees. The steps are listed below:
1. measure 2Ozs of raw galls from the tree
2. crush and dice them into small piecesThe
3. bake the gall pieces in oven so that we can grind the pieces into smaller parts
4. grind them
5. put the materials in a jar and add 8Ozs of hot water and seal the jar
The final product is after 4 days of soaking and on the 4th day night I boiled the mixture and waited for another day. The color is pretty stable after 2 days of soaking, and it didn’t change a lot after the boiling.
Adding 0.5Ozs of Iron Sulfate and Gum Arabic into the solution is the last step of Ink Making. The color of the solution would change immediately after adding the Iron Sulfate in.
Gum Arabic serves as a binding material for the ink.
The One Tree Project 