Natural Dye Easter Eggs for Spring

Easter is so late this year, I've been feeling the urge to get something spring-y on the table already. I saw this cover of Country Living and liked the idea of using natural food dyes, especially to get the blue color. I remember using onion skins to dye eggs when I was a kid, will have to try that next for some contrast. For blue, I sliced up a small head of purple cabbage, boiled 30 min in about 10c water, strained the leaves out leaving just the colored water and added 1/4c white vinegar.



Since these are for a decoration I wanted to keep unrefrigerated, I blew the eggs out (we used them in quiche - yum!) using a long metal skewer to carefully poke holes in both ends of the eggs and I also used the skewer end to break up the yolk a bit so it would come out more easily. Pretty easy, and when I immersed them in the dye I just held them under until they filled up with enough water to sink. Instead of boiling them again as the recipe directed, I left them in the hot dye bath to cool overnight. These are farm eggs from a neighbor, and started out a light tan color - so you can see the color did take well - it was interesting that the dye bath stayed red but the eggs came out blue.



The color layer was quite fragile when these came out of the dye the next morning - you can see how if you rub them before they are completely dry the color shifts around and leaves white patches. I did not rub them with oil - but was thinking they could be coated with clear acrylic craft spray to preserve them and wouldn't they be cute in a felted or paper mache nest on a mantle, or under a terrarium.



I would love to try marbleing them with onion skin or wrapping them with plants as in the cover shot - or spelling out spring as at Stitch/Craft - but I think they look lovely on our table as is and it was certainly a fun and easy craft, 30 min or so plus leaving them overnight.