This year I’m making a couple of Easter baskets for a homeless shelter here in town. I can’t wait to get started, so I’ve already begun experimenting with dyeing eggs (I’ll make fresh ones closer to Sunday). I hard boiled them, rubbed them with white vinegar using a paper towel, which is supposed to help the dye adhere to the shell, then a few of the eggs went into a pot of water with regular yellow onion skins. The eggs boiled with the onion skins for thirty minutes, and came out this pretty brown/terracotta color:
Next, a batch with red cabbage. I pulled the leaves off of the cabbage hoping that more surface area would make the dye even stronger. The cabbage boiled for an hour, and when I pulled the leaves out, it looked like so much of the color had drained out of them (& into the water! yay!). Without any heat, I lowered the eggs into the red cabbage water and three hours later they were this *gorgeous* blue color:
The last experiment was with beets – chopped up into big pieces, boiled for thirty minutes, then lowered the eggs in and let them sit in the water without any heat for a little over an hour. They turned a dusty pink color. They all turned out really pretty, but I think the blue ones (from red cabbage) are my favorite:
I posted about this last year, but my friend Amy from North Mississippi celebrates Easter, and she makes *the* most gorgeous eggs.
These are some that Amy does with red cabbage, except she leaves the eggs in the water overnight and gets this pretty, deep blue color:
So pretty, and she loves to use her McCarty pottery to show them off! Nice!
