Vegetable Dyed Eggs

I've done my fair share of faux finishes over the years. I've washed, ragged, stencilled, and stippled many walls to get the perfect imitation, of an imperfect wall. The look of vegetable dyed eggs reminds me of some of those faux finishes, and yet its done so simply, and with all natural ingredients. The end result is a perfectly imperfect, coloured egg.

Recipe:

1 cup of water

1 cup of vegetable

- torn yellow onion skins (burgundy/brown)

- chopped red cabbage (Robin's egg/ teal)

- beets (pink/plum)

-blueberries (indigo blue)

2 Tbsp. white vinegar (the acidity helps to bond the colour to the egg)

Cover and simmer the fruit/veg in water, on low for 10 minutes. Strain the fruit/veg out and add the vinegar. Pour the liquid into a container and let cool. When the dye is at room temperature, it's ready for the eggs.

If you're planning to keep and store the eggs for next year, you'll want to blow them out. {shown here}

If you're planning to decorate your Easter table with them and serve them, then boil them before dyeing.

If you like the least amount of work as possible and are too impatient to do either or those (like me) just pop the raw egg into the dye as is. I used both brown and white eggs to get as much variation from each colour, as I could.

The blueberry dye worked very quickly and after 5 minutes, the white egg had been stained a medium Indigo blue. Another 25 minutes and it was almost navy blue. The red cabbage dye took much longer to stain the white egg, but the wait was so worth it! If you want to soak them overnight, it's best to store the container in the fridge - especially if you plan on consuming the eggs.

Some spices like Paprika and Turmeric also make beautiful colours. If you want to try these, substitute the vegetable for 2 tbsp. of the spice to the water. Simmer, cool and add the vinegar.

Here are the white eggs with blueberry stain. Hold on though, do you see the more vibrant blue egg on the right? That is the a white egg, stained with the red cabbage dye.

Here are white eggs in the onion skin dye. Each was removed from the dye consecutively, every 30 minutes, giving a gradient effect

The beet stained eggs were so pretty. The darkest one on the far right was a brown egg, the rest were white.

Red cabbage turned the eggs more of an aquamarine colour than blue.

Now it's your turn! I'd love to see your results. Feel free to comment or add your own photos below.

It's going to be a pretty Easter around here :)

xx

Sophia