Easter, au Naturel: III.
You may remember my first year dyeing eggs naturally. You might well recall my second year, too. This is the third year, and I still love making my "grown-up eggs" so much!
Yellow onion skins will be my staple each year. Since I no longer work in a restaurant, it took me about two months to collect enough onion skins on my own. Next year, I'll start even earlier, I think, as I'd like to have more than the dozen or so that I had this time. I also had decided to try for a nice, deep blue using blueberry juice... only after looking in all the stores we could for over a week, we still couldn't find any! (And I refused to make my own with the current price of blueberries.) I pouted, but then I decided to go with red cabbage instead - it was rumored to create a lovely teal shade, and I thought that would look nice with my tans.
I bought a bouquet of flowers for botanicals, as well as a bunch of both parsley and cilantro. I set out working with the red cabbage first, and I was dubious of how something such a dark purple would turn teal... but then I found this in my pot!
I readied an egg with a bit of cilantro first:
I made several other eggs as well, but after 15 minutes in the boiling dye, they didn't seem to have taken much color at all. To say I was disappointed would put it mildly. :-(
"Chin up!" I thought, "You still have the onion skins!" And I did. I began by marbling a few eggs with the skins, and then I soaked the rest to create the rich brown dye. I had success on every new set of eggs. Dear onion skins, I love you. You have never let me down. :-)
I ended up dunking the eggs from the cabbage dye into the leftover onion dye, and they took on muted tans. It was neat to see, as they also still retained vivid purple swirls. And, if the egg cracked in the cooking, the cracks had remained a vibrant teal:
Another new thing I decided to try this year was to use a bit of my tatting for imprints. I had some old pieces from when I first began tatting at 12 years old. They were hardly masterpieces, to say the least, so I figured it would be fine if they were ruined i the process. The imprints didn't take *quite* as nicely as I would've hoped, but they were still very pretty:
A tatted medallion, about 3" diameter.
A tatted clover, and an egg marked off with masking tape.
As for the rest, they were all made with botanicals from the bouquet, so I'll just include them now. :-)
My favorite egg.
I think it looks like an emblem of sorts - very cool.