Update on Onion Skin Dyeing

This past Sunday our friends Karla and Ryan came over to paint eggs for Easter and as they arrived I realized that I had not bought the cheesecloth for the onion dyeing! I thought that perhaps I could use rubber bands to secure the onion skins to the eggs, and surprisingly it worked out well! This image is a little blurry, but this is what the eggs looked like in the pot. As you see I also left the remaining onion skins in the whole mix (boil for 20 minutes).

And when they come out, remove the the rubber bands and onion skins, pat dry and rub the outside with vegetable oil to give them a shiny look.

We also did a little experiment to see what would happen if you boiled the eggs in the onion skins without wrapping them, and not surprisingly they simply took on a deep brown color, in the next image you'll see the difference where the eggs in the top row were wrapped and those in the bottom row were simply boiled in the onion skin mixture.

Thanks to Ryan for the great blue color also (must be because you're an optical engineer!)
Happy Egg decorating!

Bring on Natural Egg Dyeing!

My family is European and Easter is a huge celebration, with Easter egg decorating taking up a whole day and kitchen! My dad and I used to sit at our kitchen table and paint eggs while my mum made cakes and other yummy things for Easter. One of the things we would always do was to dye eggs using onion skins, I thought I would post the instructions for you all to try at home. For those of you who are coming to my place this Sunday, we'll be doing this, bring as many onion skins as you can!

What you will need:

Vinegar
Raw eggs
Cloth squares (8 inches)
Rubber Bands
Pot of boiling water
Salt

and Onion skins of course....

1. Wet the onion skins and cloth squares, onion skins are fragile when dry so be careeful to keep the pieces as large as possible.

2. Wrap onion skins around the raw eggs covering the entire egg. Wrap the covered egg with the cloth tightly, then secure with the rubber band.

2. Lower the wrapped egg into a boiling mixture of 1 quart water and 2 tablespoons of vinegar and salt. Boil for 20 minutes.

3. Remove eggs and let cool (you can run cold water over them to cool them down). Unwrap cloth and onion skins. Oil the eggs to give them a shiny finish.

Alternatives include Tumeric dyeing, coffee and Red Cabbage dyeing, check them out HERE!

Happy Easter Egg decorating!

Bring on Easter

You may think this is a little early considering that Easter is one month away, but I have already started decorating and wanted to share my excitement with you all :)

Pottery Barn has the most beautiful decorations for Easter, and I fell in love with the Robin's eggs that they had for sale and bought some a couple of weeks ago. They had almost sold out so in my desire to get more (to put into the apothecary jar I had bought and filled with Spanish moss), I searched the web and found some more HERE


This set comes with 6 of the blue eggs I love, and 6 slightly greenish eggs that I think I will also like, potentially the green will break up the "blueness" of the display. I plan to take a picture of my jar and post it here soon, but in the meantime I am posting this one from the Pottery Barn website so you get an idea (make sure you check out all their wonderful items for Easter):


Ok, so on the blue Robin theme I have also found these gorgeous soaps for the bathroom this Easter

And of course no table can be complete without matching blue Robin's nest plates


Bring on Easter...I cannot wait!!