The Great Egg Race
Not content with leaving the chocolate egg purchases until virtually the last minute (and missing out on the lovely big Lindt eggs), I’ve only just done the traditional Polish decorated eggs.
Admittedly, it has been some time since I actually did this – umm, more years than Oscar Wilde would recommend admitting to – but I thought it would be a fun thing to pass on to the younglings.
There are two kinds of traditional Polish Easter eggs: the painted ones and these, which are stained and have the patterns scratched on. The stain, in this case, is done by boiling eggs in onion peel to get a deep brown colour. The designs are scratched on with a blade and it takes a little practise. You can probably see that the last egg is a bit less “hairy” than the first.
The children didn’t get much of a look in, due to my concerns about unleasing them on sharp knives, but they did a little. So I have high hopes that I will not only be more organised next year, but we will all be a little more competent too.
This is what you can do if you are really talented
On the subject of eggs, I was heartily amused by Canterbury lobbing metaphorical eggs at Rome in the news this morning. I can only suppose this is revenge for Rome’s attempt to poach CofE clerics previously.
Happy Easter and enjoy your eggs, whatever form they take 😀
Wow, never seen that done before, that’s a really interesting effect.
Ania – Absolutely gorgeous eggs! Kudos!
Blessings,
Bonnie
We always drew the designs with wax and then dipped them in food dye (warm so the wax melts off). Tricky but they look fab when finished. having said that, was too lazy this year and ended up just dying them patternless. Sad!
I saw a good result using leaves and flowers to get nice patterns on dyed eggs. Not sure how you attach them to the egg though.
My waxed ones went a bit wrong, the onion skin dye didn’t take. Having said that, they have an interesting aged appearance! I’ll upload a couple of pics later today.
The onion skins take a long time to dye (red onions work best) – I ended up leaving mine overnight after boiling them for about half an hour. I did wonder how your wax would work 🙂
I made two lots of dye, regular brown and red skins, and reduced them right down to concentrate the colour. The last few years we’ve had a problem with the wax melting in the hot dye before the colour could take, so I decided to try immersing in cool dye overnight, with some vinegar to fix. Maybe too much vinegar, the top layer of eggshell started to come away!
I seem to remember hearing somewhere that vinegar makes eggshells go soft (some trick involving pushing an egg through the neck of a bottle). Perhaps salt would work better as a mordant?