This year I'm making a couple of Easter baskets for a homeless shelter here in town. I can't wait to get started, so I've already begun experimenting with dyeing eggs (I'll make fresh ones closer to Sunday). Here's my first batch - hard boiled them:
Once the eggs come out of the water, I rubbed them with white vinegar using a paper towel, which is supposed to help the dye adhere to the shell.
A few of the eggs went into a pot of water with regular yellow onion skins. The eggs boiled with the onion skins for thirty minutes:
...and came out this pretty brown/terracotta color:
This is red cabbage. I pulled the leaves off of the cabbage hoping that more surface area would make the dye even stronger:
The cabbage boiled for an hour, and when I pulled the leaves out, it looked like so much of the color had drained out of them (& into the water! yay!):
Without any heat, I lowered the eggs into the red cabbage water and three hours later they were this *gorgeous* blue color:
The last experiment was with beets - chopped up into big pieces, boiled for thirty minutes, then lowered the eggs in and let them sit in the water without any heat for a little over an hour:
They turned this dusty pink color:
They all turned out really pretty, but I think the blue ones (from red cabbage) are my favorite:
I posted about this last year, but my friend Amy from North Mississippi celebrates Easter, and she makes *the* most gorgeous eggs.
She leaves her onion skin eggs in for longer that I did, and she gets them this color, which I like even better:
These are some that Amy does with red cabbage, except she leaves the eggs in the water overnight and gets this pretty, deep blue color:
So pretty, and she loves to use her McCarty pottery to show them off! Nice!
She leaves her onion skin eggs in for longer that I did, and she gets them this color, which I like even better:
These are some that Amy does with red cabbage, except she leaves the eggs in the water overnight and gets this pretty, deep blue color:
So pretty, and she loves to use her McCarty pottery to show them off! Nice!
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