Dyeing Easter Eggs, Naturally

I'm here, I'm here! *whew*

Sorry guys, I know I've been ignoring my blog the past couple of weeks, especially the stash busting part. Want to here my excuses?

1. My loan officer failed to even attempt to push my loan through on time, so I missed out on purchasing my condo and am still living out of boxes in my parents' spare bedroom. Thus, all the fun, crafty, "new home" posts I was planning on fell out the window. Grr.
2. I sometimes develop these annoying little dry itchy bumps on one of my fingers; I'm told these bumps are related to stress, but I don't really know. Maybe they are. Anyway, they crop up right where I need to feed my yarn when I'm crocheting (this started years before I began crocheting, so luckily the two aren't actually linked). Inconvenient, yes? And it happened right as I was getting into Ali's new Sherlock stitch. Grr again.

Anyway, enough whining. I'm here to show you folks what my family and I experimented with for Easter!

Dyeing Easter Eggs, the Natural Way

I've got to say, we were pretty excited to try this! My mom had a list of recipes for dying Easter Eggs using household ingredients and food, all of which sounded fun to try. I have no idea where she got the list from, plus she made a lot of the dyes while I wasn't there, so... bear with me here.

• Turmeric:

Boil some Turmeric! 1 cup of water and 2 tsp of Turmeric, if my memory serves me properly

This, as you can imagine, was going to be used to make yellow eggs! Other colours called for such things as: purple cabbage leaves (steep leaves for hours), paprika (boil), blueberries (boil and cool), coffee, grape juice (not exactly natural ((mix with vinegar))), and red onions (steep for hours).

Once the dyes are cool and ready, we found it easiest to put them into ziploc bags with the eggs and just shape them into different containers.

Coffee, Onion, and Cabbage eggs are ready; others soon to follow!

We started this all on Saturday night. Then on Easter day, they were all good and coloured!

Once they were completely dry, we were all pleasantly shocked to find out that some had turned out... glittery!

Can't fully capture the glitter in a picture, but I'm proud of how well my camera performed

That would be the grape juice and vinegar egg. Apparently, the sugar from the juice separated and crystallized. That's our guess anyway. No matter the cause, I'm just glad it happened!

So Many Eggs...

Now we just have to actually eat all of these eggs. Today I brought some leftover dinner rolls to work, along with two pretty little eggs - coffee and cabbage.

I shall peel them up and make some delicious egg salad out of plain yogurt.

And while we're on the subject of peeling eggs... does everyone else usually struggle with that? The brown shell ended up in about 40 pieces when I was done, but then I had what turned out to be a smart idea. I just cracked the blue egg on the bottom, where the little air sac is, and so I had a nice grip on the shell to peel it off! Look, it came off in almost one piece:

I'll have to remember that. Hopefully it will work every time.


One Post Down

So that was one of my Easter projects! (other one to be posted later) Hopefully some of you will think of dyeing eggs like this next year. I know I didn't break any recipes down, but that's okay; there are so many fun ones out there, using different herbs, flowers and food, that just picking which ones you want will be part of the fun!


How did everyone else enjoy their weekend?