Natural Egg Dying

We were back in the kitchen this week dying Easter eggs and enjoying a highly speculative and interesting conversation about how and why the Easter Bunny brings eggs and hides them in one’s house.  In my childhood household,  the Bunny brought eggs with Him or Her and,  judging by the dye stains in the sink the next morning, used our kitchen to dye them.  He or She  then went around our house hiding them in difficult to find places along with baskets containing more colorful eggs and candy.   Each basket was labeled with the name of a child.  The Bunny seemed to have some general sense of each child’s capacity for hunting and finding based on age.   

 

In other households,  the children took care of dying the eggs ahead of time and stored them in the refrigerator in an egg carton.  Carrots were placed on top of the carton to ensure that the Bunny could find them.  While the children were asleep the Bunny would enter the house by unknown means and hide the eggs around the house.   

Who can understand the ineffable mind of the Easter Bunny?  What is the relationship between the Bunny, who delivers the eggs, and the Chicken, who creates them?  Who cares when you have a pile of chocolate and sugar in front of you after having abstained from both for the past 40 days?

Anyway I digress.  You probably tuned in to learn about how to use natural dyes to make beautiful eggs.  It’s pretty easy.  Start with clean, uncooked white eggs.   Put some pots of water on the stove to boil with natural dyes in them.  Use about one Tbsp spice or about 1 c of fruit or vegetable and 2Tbsp of white vinegar to 4 cups of water.  Make sure the eggs are very clean, then put it in the boiling dye mixture for 15 minutes.  Basically, anything that stains fabric or your fingers will dye eggs.  If you put more of the dye stuff in the water the eggs will be darker. 

Boiling water with beets

Colors
Red or pink:  Beets, cranberries or raspberries
Orange:  Yellow onion skins or paprika
Yellow:  Tumeric
Blue: Blueberries, blackberries,  (We tried grape juice but it made the eggs sticky)
Brown:  coffee, or tea

Special Effects
   Wrap a few rubber bands around the egg before putting it in the water.  The part where the rubber band is will stay white and you get a geometric design. Quite nice.
   Draw a design on the egg with a wax crayon.  If you have little egg dying kit from the drug store there is likely to be a wax crayon in there.  You can use it to write a name on the egg. 
   Wrap the eggs in onion skins and secure with rubber bands.  Boil it in plain water for a mottled orange effect,  or in with the beet water for a orange/red egg combo. 
     Wrap some interesting dried leaves around the egg and put it in an old nylon stocking.  Put it in any of the dyes.  The leaves will create a really interesting mottled pattern.  This is my favorite method. 

A note about dying eggs with someone who is 20 months old.  
She needs a full body bib; her own set of cold water dyes from Paas; hard boiled eggs; glitter and colorful stickers; and a spoon for stirring and dipping and stirring and dipping and stirring and dipping.

Finally More Information about Easter
The name “Easter” originated with the names of an ancient Goddess and God. The Venerable Bede, (672-735 CE.) a Christian scholar, first asserted in his book De Ratione Temporum that Easter was named after Eostre (a.k.a. Eastre). She was the Great Mother Goddess of the Saxon people in Northern Europe. Similarly, the “Teutonic dawn goddess of fertility [was] known variously as Ostare, Ostara, Ostern, Eostra, Eostre, Eostur, Eastra, Eastur, Austron and Ausos.” (From Larry Boemler “Asherah and Easter,” Biblical Archaeology Review, Vol. 18, Number 3, 1992-May/June)

Please post comments,  I’m particularly interested in hearing your childhood Easter Egg rituals.

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