Something interesting happens when you throw maples leaves in a blender, then add alcohol.
Do you want to hear what?
I will start at the beginning.
One day, I sat in a backyard watching my 2-year-old wash maple leaves.
After the leaves are thoroughly washed, they need to be dried with towels. The whole activity (if I am lucky) lasts long enough for me to read a couple of pages in my book without pictures.
On this particular day, I didn’t have a book to read. I stared at the sky. I looked at the leaves and wondered what else can we do with clean maple leaves.
Sitting is not my natural state of being, so I got up, took some dried leaves into a house, and put them in a blender.
It just seemed like an interesting idea. Plus, I once read that the moisture content of fall leaves is 85-95%, and I wanted to see if water would just come out of the leaves.
It was a surprise that virtually no moisture came out of the leaves. In fact, after spinning in the blender for a few minutes, the leaves felt dry to the touch.
I don’t know what normal people would have done at this point, but I dumped the crushed maple leaves in a large pot, added some water, and started boiling them.
I would be honest, I was just curious to see if the water will turn green. And if yes, would the color be intense enough to use as green paint for our art projects?
I kept a close watch and tested a bit of liquid after 10 minutes, 30 minutes, and 60 minutes.
The water did turn green, but the color was pretty light. It didn’t stop my six-year-old from wanting to paint with it.
From four years of school chemistry classes, I vaguely remembered that the mildly alkaline quality of baking soda sometimes helps to bring out colors (i.e., it does a good job of bringing a blue color out of red cabbage. Right?).
So, here comes baking soda. I tested small amounts of leaf water adding a bit more at a time. However, playing with baking soda didn’t do much to improve the intensity of color in our maple-leaf mixture. See for yourself below!
So, the next natural step seemed to be alcohol. My grandma, who was a chemist by profession, used alcohol on pretty much everything. Bug bites? Rub it with alcohol. Caught a cold? How about a tablespoon of food-grade alcohol with rushed garlic in it? (As kids, we sometimes realized that we were not that sick after all and would rather go to school than drink grandma’s remedy 🙂
But back to my experiment! It turned out that alcohol was the best thing to extract the color from maple leaves! In case you want to try this experiment at home, I will now outline the steps for you.
How to Extract Chlorophyll
from Maple Leaves
What you will need
- Fresh Maple leaves (we washed them, but feel free to skip this step)
- Alcohol (we used the regular Isopropyl alcohol 91% sold as first aid antiseptic)
- Food processor or Blender (we used a food processor equipped with an S-blade. I once blew up our smoothie blender while mixing newspaper with water to make a mash for one of my science experiments 🙂
- Pot with water
- Mason Jar
- Cheesecloth
Procedure
1. Remove stems from maple leaves. (My kids LOVE this step! Plus, you can use the stems to practice the alphabet, and that’s fun too!).
2. Add maple leaves to the blender and process until all leaves have the same consistency. (NOTE: You can add whole leaves to the alcohol to achieve the same result, but you will need a bigger pot and more alcohol).
3. Fill a pot with a few inches of water and place over medium heat. Place a mason jar with alcohol in the pot. Note: In our experiment, we used 2 Tablespoons of alcohol for each ½ cup of mashed leaves. Make sure your leaves are entirely covered.
4. Once the alcohol warms up … (NOTE: alcohol is highly flammable; you only need to get it warm and no more), add leaves to the mason jar and wait.
Check on the color as you are waiting. This is the exciting part! You can see the alcohol turning a dark green color right in front of your eyes! It’s the pigment from the leaves moving into alcohol.
5. Now, you can put some leaves onto a cheesecloth and squeeze the liquid out.
My kids were absolutely amazed! And so was I!
Look how strong the color is!
We used a dropper to transfer some chlorophyll to a wine glass just for the sheer pleasure of watching it swirl and twirl on the way down.
I’m curious to try nail polish remover next time. I think it might be fun!
Science
Start by looking at green maple leaves with your kids. A magnifying glass makes it even more fun. Ask, Why are leaves green?
I usually reply something along the lines of: This is a great guess! Interesting! I like how your mind works.
Have you heard of the word “chlorophyll”?
The green color in a leaf comes from chlorophyll [klor-uh-fill]. Chlorophyll absorbs sunlight and helps plants manufacture their own food by the process called photosynthesis.
Do you know why maple leaves turn yellow and red in the fall?
Along with chlorophyll, leaves contain yellow and orange carotenoids. The greater amount of green coloring masks those additional colors. As autumn days get shorter and colder, maple leaves stop producing chlorophyll. Once the chlorophyll is gone, the green color disappears, and other colors become visible. That’s why maple leaves suddenly become red, yellow, and orange in the fall!
Two Unique Art Ideas
1. Painting with chlorophyll
The above picture was painted by dipping an index finger into the extracted chlorophyll. Doesn’t the color look great? Conventional finger paint move over! What’s more, this chlorophyll paint didn’t fade over time!
2. Creating with pulp
And what about the pulp inside the cheesecloth?
We couldn’t just toss it away!
Oh, no! Not me!
I drew a maple leaf on a piece of paper. Then, I invited my kids to cover it with glue (lots of it!), and then cover glue with our leaf pulp.
Voila, super cute 3D maple leaf!!!
Sprinkle it with green glitter. Generously! And look at it any time you feel like you need some feel-good vibes.
Extension activity
If green plants are green because they contain chlorophyll, does it mean adding chlorophyll to some plants will make them green (or greener)?
I had to find out!
I picked white flowers from the backyard, put them into a clear glass filled with water, and added the extracted chlorophyll.
[…] 2. Leaf Chromatography […]