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For our Spring Equinox egg hunt, we made our traditional plant and vegetable dyed eggs. We have been doing this since my children were four, and it is something they look forward to every year. This year I let them color pictures on the eggs with beeswax crayons first to try something new. There were baby chick eggs, fairy eggs, eyeball eggs, mother earth eggs, you name it. While they were doing this, I took four large stainless steel pots and filled them with chopped beets, purple cabbage, nettles and turmeric root.
I filled each pot with just enough water to cover eggs, and boiled them with the plant material and a generous splash of vinegar for 15 minutes. Then the pots sat with lids on for about two hours.
When I removed the eggs, they had turned some lovely colors. The beet eggs were pale pink, the cabbage eggs were violet blue, and the turmeric eggs were bright yellow, and the nettle eggs were pale green!
Hunting for all these eggs was great fun, and the chickens got a special spring treat of boiled cabbage and beets. My happy egg hunters will be eating a lot of deviled eggs and egg salad this week!
For further adventures in natural dyeing, I have heard that onion skins (we just hadn't saved any this year), coffee grounds, spinach, blackberries, huckleberries, and indigo work well too and make some interesting colors. It's fun to experiment and see what you come up with.
Happy Spring!
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