So you’re at the rink and your wheels look like crap because they are white. Maybe you think its okay, but when other people skate past you in their colourful wheels it looks like you didn’t even try to make yourself look good. You can go buy colored wheels or spray paint them, but the spray paint wears off after a few hours and the wheels you buy don’t fit your skates. So here’s what you do:

Silky Terrier Dog Breed Playing Aro... Silky Terrier Dog Breed Playing Around

Soak some newspaper in water until it is dripping wet, then wring out the excess water so that it’s just damp. You can use whatever colors of newspaper you want, but if your skates are white, black newspaper works best because it will be easiest to see on white.

Regular ink doesn’t dye anything at all except paper, so this takes special newsprint ink. If you have access to newsprint preparation equipment you might try to run basic tests with different combinations of dying agents and/or different temperatures or other variables. But for our purposes I’m going to assume that we only have access to basic ingredients found in a typical kitchen. I’m going to assume that we don’t have access to equipment for dealing with large amounts of ink or dying agents and won’t be able to do anything more than small tests.

But the important thing is that there are some things we can do, and we just need an initial idea of what will work and what won’t. Here’s how you get the ink out: Weigh out ~1/4 cup salt per cup of newsprint ink, then add water until you get a paste-like consistency. Mix it up so that all the salt dissolves in the water (if it doesn’t dissolve right away add more water). Then stir in your food coloring agent(s) until they are mixed evenly into the paste.

Now your dying agent is ready to use! Add it to a small jar of hot water (my little test jars are probably about 30 ml or 1 ounce each). If you want the final color of the ink to be brighter, add some salt to the ink before you start heating it up. This will help separate dye molecules so that they will spread out and dissolve into the water better.