Sunday, April 24, 2011

Easter Eggs!

It's all about chickens and eggs this spring for us, isn't it? This Easter we decided to try something different: naturally dying our eggs. It was so much fun that we got totally carried away trying too many things and ended up with 40 eggs. Crazy. But check them out!



My favorites were the "onion" and "red cabbage" eggs. Onion because they were so easy and quick, and fool proof, and cabbage because of the lovely blue we got.

The onion ones are the deep golden rust-colored ones. All we did was wrap each egg up in the outer onion skin and put a rubber band on it and boil in water with a splash of vinegar. So easy, so cool.

The blue ones were more of a pain, and I almost gave up on them. We chopped up red cabbage and added in some vinegar and started boiling. And kept boiling. And the eggs were still bright white after half an hour. And an hour. Plus, the dye was pink, not blue... so I was a bit worried.



It was getting late so I decided just to turn it all off and let them soak. But when we woke up, we were in for a surprise - LOOK!



(The ones in the back were soaked in coffee grounds.)

Here are the results of our grape juice boil and our spinach boil. I now wish I'd let the eggs soak in the spinach overnight as well. Live and learn!



We also tried beets (the pink washed off in the end). Those are some of the brown-looking eggs in the first photo.

Anyway, it was interesting and a nice change up from the regular store-bought dyes. Happy Easter!

Oh, wait, I have chicken coop pictures too - I know you are wondering what we got done this week with that! Well, we got one of the people-sized doors done. And now it's raining, so I don't know if anything else will get done for a bit - we need to work on the the roof.



4 comments:

  1. OMG! This is the coolest!
    Happy Easter!
    Smiles~
    Cricket

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  2. Oh that is totally cool. My daughter and I want to know how you did the variegated colored eggs... I wonder if I could tye die shirts this way???
    Happy Easter!

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  3. Shirley, those are "silk tie easter eggs" - http://www.marthastewart.com/article/silk-tie-easter-eggs

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  4. WOW, I haven't seen as cool eggs since I was a kid and we did Polish wax decorated and dyed eggs. Yours look so cool. I have heard of naturally dying eggs. You've made me want to try it too. Congrats!

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