Naturally Easter

Nothing artificial here!

I tried a new method of dying Easter eggs this week. I had seen some other sites mentioning ways to dye eggs using only natural ingredients, so I hopped on board and tried a few! After googling for a while, this is the site that I got the instructions from. 

I used red onion, red cabbage, paprika, and green tea. My picture shows tumeric and blueberries, but I decided to use green tea for my yellow eggs instead of tumeric and I bought fresh instead of frozen blueberries. You're supposed to use frozen, so I'll try that one next year!

Green tea and red onions at work

Overall it was a success. If I had more time/bigger bowls/more fridge space/more dye I would have left lots of eggs in the dye overnight in the fridge for more vibrant color. I left most of the eggs in the dyes for 15 minutes or so and they were a very nice pastel hue. I put some in the fridge until evening and they darkened quite nicely.

pretty pastels

Here's my verdict:

Green Tea: Yellow Very easy to do! Just brew green tea, cool to room temp and soak the eggs! I used 5 old tea bags that I knew I was never going to use and 1 cup water. Paprika: Orange A very pale orange and is all speckled from the spice bits. Again, very easy because it's just a cup of boiling water and a couple tablespoons of paprika. 
Red Onion: Jade Green Jade Green? Ha! How about camo-brown green? Not so successful! Now, I could have done something wrong, but I followed directions (boiling red onion skins) and it was definitely barely greenish tinged brown. 

Big ol' bowl of red cabbage dye

Red Cabbage: Blue For sure the best of the batch!! 1/2 of a head of red cabbage makes enough dye to soak 8-9 eggs at a time. These are very pretty as a pastel blue and becomes a vibrant blue if left to soak for hours. I modified slightly and did 1/2 head of cabbage chopped into chunks in 5 cups of boiling water. Stir in 2 Tbs of white vinegar and let cool to room temp before straining out the cabbage. Aaaaand, you can take the slightly boiled cabbage and put oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper and on it and you have a tasty salad!

In this picture you can see some eggs that have polkadots. These appeared by themselves!! Maybe wash the eggs before dying? I don't know.  

Quick soaked!!! Left: red onion (blah!!) Top middle: paprika  Bottom middle: Red cabbage  Right top: green tea

After a long soak in the red cabbage 

Red cabbage and green tea

Next year I'd like to try the blueberries, and maybe some saffron. I'll do green tea and cabbage again, but I think I'll skip the paprika and red onion.