Natural Dyed Eggs 2015

If you've never tried natural dyed eggs and don't know where to start, red cabbage, yellow onion skins and turmeric are a good place to start. I almost always boil my eggs in the dye bath and then leave them in their dye baths overnight. But I have also taken white hardboiled eggs and dropped them into cold dye baths. It doesn't seem to make much of a difference, as long as you soak them for a long time, preferably overnight.

~Red Cabbage~

Shred the outer half of a head of red cabbage and boil in just enough water to cover to eggs and cabbage. Boil eggs in cabbage and then drain and pour dye into mason jars. Add eggs. Refrigerate overnight once the dye has cooled.

{From left to right: dye bath with vinegar, nothing, & baking soda}

 To vary the color and intensity, add 1 Tbl. of vinegar or 1 tsp. baking soda to the cup of dye and allow eggs to sit overnight. As we discovered the last time we tried the red cabbage experiment, too much baking soda will not produce the desired teal color. (I forgot this year and used 1 Tbl. instead of a teaspoon and that was too much for the small jar of dye.)

 ~Yellow Onions Skins & Turmeric~

 I used about 1 gallon bag worth of onion skins for a medium sized pot (4 qt.) that held 9 eggs. Shred yellow onion skins in food processor to help collapse them down and place in pot (optional). Cover eggs and skins with water. Boil for 12 minutes. Drain and pour dye into mason jars. Add eggs.

For turmeric dye, boil eggs in a small pot (1qt.) with 3 Tablespoons of turmeric. I have to admit with the turmeric, leaving them in the dye bath overnight didn't really seem to affect the color or intensity.

{Both of these were only boiled in their dyes, not dyed overnight.}

The two on the left were boiled in an onion skin dye and then dyed overnight too. The one on the right was a white egg boiled in plain water that sat in cold onion skin dye overnight (but was not boiled in it).

More onion skin dyed egg that sat overnight in their dye. This is the first time I've gotten eggs this red. Oiling them with olive oil helped bring out the bright red color.

Easter is a season… it's not too late to try natural dyed eggs!

Natural Dyed Egg Roundup

Naturally dyed Easter eggs from 2010

For those of you looking, you can find a round-up off all of my posts on dyeing Easter eggs with natural dyes (veggies, tea, coffee, etc...) by clicking here. Happy Holy Saturday!

Veggie Dyed Eggs 2013

This year's Easter eggs were, as usual, part decoration and part science experiment. Last year we experimented with our red cabbage eggs, this year it was the yellow onions skins. We tested a couple of different methods. A friend on FB pointed me towards this blog and a method that produces crimson colored eggs. We've done onion skin eggs for years and have never had the luck to produce crimson colored eggs; ours turn out more reddish orange. I hope the owner of this blog will give us some more information on how she got the crimson color. Maybe it was the kind of onions she used. Anyway, as I said, we tested a couple of different methods.

On the left, boiled in the onion skins (following the directions on the Nourishing Minimalism blog), on the right, pre-boiled in plain water but soaked in onion skin juice for about 4-5 hours.

On the left, also boiled in the onion skins but left to soak overnight. On the right, pre-boiled in plain water and soaked in onion skin juice overnight. We really couldn't tell much of a difference between the 5 hours soakers and the overnight soakers.

We tried some baking soda to see if it would effect the color the way it does for cabbage eggs. We did both the in-skin boiling and the pre-boiling but added baking soda to them as they soaked. There did seem to be a change to the pre-boiled one on the right, but the one on the left that was boiled directly in the onion skins looks like the other two. Maybe with a few more lighter flecks.

 This one was just for fun. We let a pre-boiled egg sit overnight with the leftover onion skins piled all over it.

 This one was the same as above but with cabbage leaves. 

 If you have any questions about how we dye our eggs, I'd love to help. Remember... Easter is a season! Keep celebrating!

 

*These photos have not been edited in any way. 

Naturally Dyed Easter Egg Roundup

Naturally dyed Easter eggs from 2010

For those of you looking, you can find a round-up off all of my posts on dyeing Easter eggs with natural dyes (veggies, tea, coffee, etc...) by clicking here. We are on Spring Break this week and are going to be tackling some spring cleaning, preparing our house and our hearts for the celebration of the Triduum. I will be popping in to post some pictures. Have a blessed Holy Week!

Cabbage Eggs

I meant to post this last week but then I didn't get to it. I mentioned that our first batch of cabbage dyed eggs didn't work and I think it was because my hand slipped while pouring the baking soda and I dumped more than I intended. So we decided to see if various amounts of baking soda affected the color of this second batch. Our experiment was to boil red cabbage leaves, make a natural vegetable dye and then test different amounts of baking soda on the dye both with and without vinegar.

Here were the results:

According to the natural egg dying lore out there, baking soda makes the dye look more teal than blue and that has always been our experience. You can see it most strongly in the second row from the bottom egg on the right. Except this time. You can judge the results of this highly unscientific experiment yourself. 

This one is deceptive. It was dyed in cabbage dye and 1 Tbl. of vinegar. The vinegar is supposed to soften the shell just slightly and help it accept the dye... kind of like sanding before you paint. Well, it turned out this really lovely blue color but as you can see...

... that was only a surface film. It rubbed off as soon as we started handling the eggs. 

When all was said and done, it was about the same as the rest.

 

Easter Eggs

The kids wanted to make eggs using vegetable dyes again and were really excited about it until the stench of boiling cabbage, onion skins and vinegar started choking them. If you've never dyed eggs with vegetable dyes before, then let me warn you that your house WILL smell like sauerkraut!

Suddenly, they were nowhere to be found! I'm kidding, kind of. They did help make the botanical eggs, inspired by Alicia. 

We actually had a problem with our red cabbage eggs this year. The dye didn't take for most of them. I suspect too much baking soda but I haven't tested that theory out yet. Since the Easter season lasts 50 days, there is still plenty of time to experiment!

We made some more marble cracked eggs but the kids gobbled those up for their Easter morning breakfast before I took any pictures.

How did your eggs turn out?

Head over to Catholic Cuisine for a link-up party and add your posts so we can all see them!

 

Cracked

What to do with cracked eggs? You know you will inevitably get one or two this weekend. Well, a cousin of mine posted a picture of some eggs that looked like these on FB and it reminded me of some Chinese Tea Eggs I had made a long, long time ago (very early in my married life!). So I made these to show the kids and they were so excited that now we will be adding them to our Easter plans this year.

Super easy! Just boil the eggs the way you normally would. When they are finished, move them to a bath of ice water. After they are cool enough to touch (just a few minutes), pick them up and crack them gently with the back of a spoon. You decide how cracked you want them to be! Drop them in a cup of ice cold colored water (I used food coloring but you could probably use Kool-Aid or even natural dyes). Don't worry about adding vinegar... you aren't dyeing the shells. I left mine in the fridge overnight to get these really vibrant colors. Peel the eggs and then... viola!

I think these would make some ultra colorful Deviled Eggs, don't you?

 

Easter Plans

Getting our plans cemented in my mind and reposting this veggie dyed egg post for those searching for it...

1. Confession on Wednesday! How awesome is this from Bishop Farrell?

I have asked every parish in the Diocese of Dallas to have their doors open on Wednesday, April 4^th, from 6:30-9:00 p.m. to welcome anyone seeking the Sacrament of Reconciliation.   Whether it is someone who has been away from the Church for awhile or a Catholic who attends Mass regularly but has not gone to confession in some time, we invite them to take advantage of this special night. This initiative, called The Light is On For You, originated in the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. during the time that I served as auxiliary bishop there, so I saw first-hand how successful it was and how meaningful it could be in the lives of the faithful.  Because of that, I asked our priests and ministry leaders to make this evening available here in our diocese.  

A light in the window is an ancient sign of welcome. Jesus will be waiting for you.  No reservations are needed.

The Light is on for you

2. Holy Thursday Biblically inspired meal (lamb roast, homemade pita bread, salad, fruit salsa w/ cinnamon chips, feta cheese)
3. Good Friday Stations and displaying our cross
4. Holy Saturday egg dying (leave them overnight in the fridge and reveal them on Easter morning!)
5. Easter Sunday!: Holy Mass followed by a hunt for the ALLE----- the word we can't say right now and Easter baskets, Resurrection Rolls or Easter Nest Bread (haven't decided yet), dinner of ham, potato salad, rolls, and steamed green beans with Icebox Eclair for the kids (ignore the low fat stuff) and Pina Colada Pound Cake for the grownups!




~from the archives~

This year's eggs, starting with the deep maroon one in the 12 o'clock position and moving clockwise are: red onion skins, sweet onion skins (which I thought were yellow onions, but aren't actually), red cabbage with baking soda, red boiler onions, red cabbage (no baking soda), wrapped in red cabbage leaves while soaking in red cabbage juice, boiled in beet juice, and wrapped in boiled red cabbage leaves without juice (in the middle).

We have been dying eggs naturally for a few years now all the while still having some fun with food coloring here and there. I'm not THAT green! This year, we kept our dyes simple, but experimented a little with technique. While I am by no means a natural dyed eggspert, I have learned a few things here and there that I can share.

These eggs were cold dyed only. I boiled the eggs in plain water and let them cool. Then I reserved extra liquid from the dye baths and let that cool. When both were completely cool, I placed a pre-boiled white egg in the dye baths and put them in the fridge overnight.

The first thing you must be committed to accepting, if you are going to try to go au naturale with your eggs... nothing is guaranteed. Just like in nature, uniformity and evenness are very hard to find. Most things are random and a little odd.

Everyone loved the markings on this egg. That is not a glare in the center, but rather a white spot that formed where the egg sat on the bottom of the cup, I suspect. I'm not sure what created the streaks of color surrounding the white spot, but I like it!

The other thing you have to embrace is that this is a long process. No instant gratification here! Get the kids to write out their predictions, leave the eggs in their dye baths overnight and see how well everyone predicted in the morning. As I have said before, we view it as part Easter fun, part science experiment.

This one had the best marble effect. It was cold dyed in sweet onion skin juice overnight.

Also, if you want a lot of onion skins, but not a lot of onions, ask the produce manager if you can clean out the onion trays. They just might be happy to oblige! You get all the onion skins you want, they get some free labor. Win win!

If you have questions on specific instructions, please feel free to ask! You can find previous years' pictures and ponderings in these posts below:

2009 ~ Eggs. Naturally! and Final Thoughts on Eggs

2008 ~ Eggsellent Creativitea

2007 ~ Egg-cellent Fun!

Veggie Egg-stravaganza

This year's eggs, starting with the deep maroon one in the 12 o'clock position and moving clockwise are: red onion skins, sweet onion skins (which I thought were yellow onions, but aren't actually), red cabbage with baking soda, red boiler onions, red cabbage (no baking soda), wrapped in red cabbage leaves while soaking in red cabbage juice, boiled in beet juice, and wrapped in boiled red cabbage leaves without juice (in the middle).

We have been dying eggs naturally for a few years now all the while still having some fun with food coloring here and there. I'm not THAT green! This year, we kept our dyes simple, but experimented a little with technique. While I am by no means a natural dyed eggspert, I have learned a few things here and there that I can share.

These eggs were cold dyed only. I boiled the eggs in plain water and let them cool. Then I reserved extra liquid from the dye baths and let that cool. When both were completely cool, I placed a pre-boiled white egg in the dye baths and put them in the fridge overnight.

The first thing you must be committed to accepting, if you are going to try to go au naturale with your eggs... nothing is guaranteed. Just like in nature, uniformity and evenness are very hard to find. Most things are random and a little odd.

Everyone loved the markings on this egg. That is not a glare in the center, but rather a white spot that formed where the egg sat on the bottom of the cup, I suspect. I'm not sure what created the streaks of color surrounding the white spot, but I like it!

The other thing you have to embrace is that this is a long process. No instant gratification here! Get the kids to write out their predictions, leave the eggs in their dye baths overnight and see how well everyone predicted in the morning. As I have said before, we view it as part Easter fun, part science experiment.

This one had the best marble effect. It was cold dyed in sweet onion skin juice overnight.

Also, if you want a lot of onion skins, but not a lot of onions, ask the produce manager if you can clean out the onion trays. They just might be happy to oblige! You get all the onion skins you want, they get some free labor. Win win!

If you have questions on specific instructions, please feel free to ask! You can find previous years' pictures and ponderings in these posts below:

2009 ~ Eggs. Naturally! and Final Thoughts on Eggs

2008 ~ Eggsellent Creativitea

2007 ~ Egg-cellent Fun!

Final thoughts on eggs

Barbara wanted to know if our eggs tasted like the foods and spices we used to dye them. The answer is yes and no. Some of the stronger smelling spices like curry and cinnamon left a very strong smell behind on the shell and did slightly flavor the eggs. Some people advise piercing the shell to prevent cracking while boiling and I would think that you could expect to taste more flavor if you did that. I don't do that so the eggs were not affected by flavor except those that I mentioned. Now the color of the egg inside was affected by many of our dyes even though the flavor wasn't. Beets turned the egg white pink (much to Sunshine's delight), red cabbage turned the whites blue and golden turnips turned them yellow.

One thing I also want to mention is that the colors on the shell change as they sit in the fridge after dying. Those mauve colored beet eggs are now more brownish than pinkish. The purple and pink spots on the berry eggs faded to gray. Your best colors are going to be achieved the day you take them out of their dye baths. And as Sue discovered, some of them will have a film that should be allowed to dry without too much handling but also creates a great opportunity for scratching in religious symbols.

I also wanted to share here what I wrote in Barbara's combox:

My kids approach our natural dyes like a science experiment. We go to the grocery store, they pick out weird foods, we bring them home, chop them up and boil them. Then they try to guess what will happen and the next day, they compare results. Now this year, since I had some last minute Alleluia letters to decorate to replace the banner that we lost, Husband came home with a PAAS kit and kept the kids busy while I snuck off and painted. They enjoy both activities but on totally different levels.

I personally love the colors and textures and the surprise factor of naturally dyed eggs and my kids do too, but they also love the fun factor of prepackaged dyes. My husband, who is not a crafty man by nature, even had fun blowing food coloring around a plain white egg and then dipping it in yellow dye to produce an egg that would have made Jackson Pollock proud! (I was popping in and out of the bathroom where I was secretly painting our Alleluia letters so that they could be hidden around the house and hunted for on Easter morning and was very thankful for the distraction.) The two forms of egg decorating that we participated in this weekend are not mutually exclusive. My kids see kit dying as a fun craft and natural egg dying as an experiment. I don't see any reason why both can't have a place in the celebration of Easter.


What to do with all those leftover eggs? Easter Egg Salad, of course!

Eggs. Naturally!

Easter Eggs 2009

starting in the 12 o'clock position and going clockwise:
1. boiled in cinnamon (no overnight) 2. covered in shredded blue potato 3. blue potato (big color disappointment; see below) 4. paprika 5. 3 berry mixture (raspberries, blueberries & blackberries) 6. covered in shredded berries overnight (this produced pink and purple spots mixed with the greyish 7. cinnamon 8. (in the middle of both pictures because it was our favorite) egg was boiled wrapped and tied in already used yellow onion skins (no overnight)

starting with bright red egg and moving clockwise: 1. yellow onion skins 2. curry 3. beets 4. shredded red cabbage leaves 5. (looks green but is more teal) red cabbage juice and baking soda 6. shredded beets 7. red cabbage 8. golden turnips 9. middle one is the same as above

While we didn't achieve all of the colors we were hoping for, the combination of colors and textures just astounded us. I just don't think I can ever go back to PAAS after this!

I have read that some people have had trouble producing colors from natural food dyes. I suspect that they aren't giving the process enough time or eliminating the vinegar. The vinegar that is added to the tablet dyes isn't to help the dye but rather to help the shell accept it. Remember this science experiment? Vinegar breaks down the egg shell. So you still need that vinegar when you are using vegetables, spices and fruits.

Regarding the time, this is not an instant gratification process like food coloring. In the top picture, the egg in the 12 o'clock position and the one next to it (at 11) were both boiled in cinnamon. The 12 o'clock egg was not left to sit in the liquid overnight while the 11 o'clock egg was. You can see the difference in intensity of color pretty clearly. My husband joked and congratulated us that we had made a brown egg... just like a chicken!

I think there are too many eggs and too many variations to play a guessing game this year. The identifying information is below each picture. All eggs were boiled with the item mentioned and all but two were left in that liquid overnight in the fridge except for those that were covered in shredded vegetable or fruit and refrigerated overnight without the liquid included.

Biggest disappointment! This purple potato looked like it would produce a beautiful purple or lavender color. Nope. Brown and grayish-green. Meh.

Hope you had a wonderful today and a glorious tomorrow!

Eggsellent Creativitea

We had so much fun last year experimenting with natural eggs dyes that we had hoped to do it this year. I had plans to go down to the farmer's market or the local big fancy food store and let the kids each pick some kind of fruit of vegetable to test. Well, since getting out and about was practically impossible last week, on Thursday, I decided to let the kids have at my tea drawer. Not totally. There are some darn good decaffeinated ones in there, so we chose only the ones that were super charged or the ones that nobody liked. The kids each took a look at the color of the brewed teas and made predictions on the final outcomes. All of the eggs were soaked in their tea baths overnight. While we didn't get some of the vibrant colors we got last time, we did get some very interesting textures! On the other hand, the colors are probably closer to some of the actual variations you might find in nature.

So... same game as last year. I will number the eggs here and when you are ready for the results, open up the combox.

Starting with the orange one in the 3 o'clock position and going clockwise, these are the colors we see:

1. light orange
2. grayish green speckled
3. gray
   
4. mustard yellow
5. This one was wrapped in the used bags of #3.
6. blueish gray mottled
7. very light brown mottled
   

The one in the middle was in the same bath as #6 only for a few hours, not overnight.

Here are the possible dyes: Wild Sweet Orange, Passion, China Green Tips, Sugar Plum Spice, Madagascar Vanilla Red, and cranberry (not the tea, the fruit... I had a bag in the freezer)

Let me know how you did! Have a Blessed Easter season!