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Easter Eggs!

 We don't dye eggs every year for Easter any more.  Since the kids are older, it's not something they always want to do.

This year however, Emily had seen a tutorial about how to dye eggs using common materials instead of a kit.  We thought it would be a good project because if there's ever a zombie apocalypse, we'll still be able to dye eggs for Easter even without electric stoves and mass produced dye-kits.

We scoured the neighborhood looking for small flowers and leaves.  We wet them and held them to raw eggs.  Then we wrapped them in pantyhose and rubber bands.

 We boiled three eggs in a pot of water filled with onion skins.

 And we boiled the others in a pot of water with red cabbage leaves.

 The eggs that had been boiled with the onion skins came out very brown.  The shapes of the flowers and leaves weren't clear but we were still pleased.

 The eggs that were boiled with the purple cabbage came out the color of putty despite the fact that we gave them the added bonus of spending the night in the refrigerator still in their pot of very purple water.  Maybe we should have boiled them in beet juice.

Then we dyed eggs from a traditional kit just because we wanted to.

The colors are brighter and more fun. 

So for now, we'll use the kit, but it's nice to know in a pinch (zombie apocalypse) we have options for future generations to have Easter eggs.

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