Colorful Easter Eggs... Naturally
(Page 3 of 3)
March/April 1983
By the Mother Earth News editors
Deeper blues and purples can be made with the juice of blueberries, or a combination of cranberries and dark grapes. You can even heat canned, sweetened juices for this purpose ... but you'll end up with a sticky, sugary coating that must be removed by dipping the egg momentarily in hot water or wiping it off with a damp paper towel or rag.
RELATED CONTENT
Country Lore: How you can keep all your fresh eggs for winter use....
Country Lore: A helpful hint on detecting rooster eggs...
Tests show free-range eggs are more nutritious and have half the cholesterol of supermarket eggs....
For a truly herbal shampoo, try this easy recipe for homemade shampoo made with yucca. Find out how...
If your hair color is looking a little tarnished, color your hair with one of these natural hair co...
If you'd rather not steep the eggs, you can rub berry juice directly on the shells to color them ... then wipe away the excess with a soft, dry cloth.
A similar technique is employed to make a truly beautiful lavender egg. Simply crush a whole blackberry — either fresh or frozen — between your fingers and then rub it over the surface of a hot, dry egg. Afterward, don't rinse the Easter decoration, but do buff it lightly with a soft, dry towel. By experimenting with berries of different degrees of ripeness, you can make various shades of purple by using this method.
True green — although it's such a prominent color in the palette of nature — is surprisingly difficult to produce with natural dyes. Some folks have tried spinach leaves ... but the results are unpredictable at best, ranging from muddy brown to sickly yellow . You can get a dark green (almost olive) egg, though, by first dyeing it yellow — using a bath of yellow onion skins — and then dipping it into the blue dye made from red cabbage. And a muted green can sometimes be achieved by boiling the papery skins of red onions!
As you can see, the rules of natural egg dyeing are by no means hard and fast. All you really need is a spirit of adventure ... the willingness to experiment ... and access to some colorful homegrown dyeing materials. So take a foraging tour around your property and your kitchen, gather the youngsters together to help, and begin a natural celebration of spring. The results of your work may very well be too pretty to eat!
EDITOR'S NOTE. Some of the formulas described in this article were adapted — with the permission of Rodale Press, Inc. —from "Color Easter Eggs With Dyes From Natural Foods". which appeared on page 118 of the April 1979 issue of Organic Gardening magazine (copyright © 1979).
To order the back issue of THE MOTHER EARTH NEWS ® referred to in this article, turn to page 148.
Page:
<< Previous 1 |
2 | 3 |
