Shades of Spring

It's a rainy day, but my kitchen is bright with the pastel hues of naturally dyed Easter eggs.

Easter is one of my favorite holidays. Come to think of it, I'm comfortable calling it my favorite.
It brings a promise of spring, first blooms, fun crafts and a wide range of treats to make. My family traditionally gives up sweets for lent, which makes Easter Sunday a major celebration.

But cakes aside (not for too long, I'll write another post later in the week about Easter cakes), one of my favorite Easter activities is decorating eggs. When I was young my mother would get out a book of traditional Lithuanian Easter egg designs, and I remember looking at every page. These types of eggs are usually intricate, designs created using hot wax before dying or scratching color off after dying.

Once I was old enough to be trusted with hot wax and sharp tools we never used traditional egg dyes. We usually used onion peels, which we would save up all year and then boil to create a dye pot. The eggs, once soaked, would come out in various shades of oranges depending how long they soaked. Left for just a little while the shells were a pretty pale gold. Left for a longer period they would come out a rich deep orange that I can only describe as luxurious.

This year I haven't yet used onion peels, but I'm planning to later in the week. Last year I created more natural colors using beets and purple cabbage. The beets, cut and boiled in water and vinegar, turned the egg shells light pink. The cabbage (with the same treatment) turned them pale blue.

Wanting to expand my egg coloring range, this year I also used turmeric, tea, red wine and spinach. The spinach was a flop, hardly tinting the shells. Turmeric gave a pale to bright yellow, the tea turned eggs a dark brown, and the wine made a lovely shade of gray with a violet tone.

In addition to traditional white eggs, I dyed some brown eggs, expecting darker shades. Maybe it was the vinegar, but some of them came out much lighter than when they went in, much to my surprise. It was a pretty cool result! I especially liked it on an egg I decorated with bees wax - the design ended up darker than the egg, which I'd never had before!

To decorate with wax, I use a pin head - I stuck the pin in the eraser of a pencil to give me something to grip. Usually melting the wax presents a problem (fondu stands and tin foil have been used previously). This year I used a candle heated wax warmer (duh) to melt crumbles of bees wax.
Once the wax was good and hot, I dipped the pin in and quickly transferred the wax to an egg. The traditional Lithuanian techniques include making simple dots or making a dot and then dragging it to create a tapering line. Patterns on most traditionally decorated eggs are a combination of these two simple applications.

Color won't adhere to the waxed area, but wax can be applied over colors, so by dying the egg multiple times and waxing in between even more intricate patterns can be created. Honestly, I usually don't have the attention span to do that, although I always intend to.

I'm not as good at etching Easter eggs, but if I get some practice this week I'll share more on those techniques as well.

I prefer blowing out my dyed eggs to hard boiling them. This involves pricking a hole in each end of an egg, holding it over a bowl and blowing into one of the holes. The whites and yolk will drain out the other hole, leaving you with just the shell. This makes the Easter eggs last a lot longer - in fact, the blue eggs shown in the photos are from last year! They've held up wonderfully, with no rot.

While the colors I've gotten so far aren't particularly deep or bright, I'm delighted with them both visually and knowing that they aren't toxic, are all natural and are a variation on how Easter eggs were traditionally dyed.