Eggs of course.

More dyeing but this time its eggs that I'm dyeing to have a lovely basket for Easter. I make traditional paste eggs dyeing them with onion skins, its difficult to get white eggs these days and the food colouring eggs don't look as pretty when dyed over brown eggs.For those of you that don't know what a paste egg is it is a hard boiled egg that has resist patterns on it and is boiled in an edible dye. We don't eat ours they are just used for decoration and if the grandchildren are around, for egg rolling competitions!

There are many easy ways to put the patterns onto the eggs, here are a few, stick small leaves or flowers onto the surface, wetting the leaves first helps them to adhere better but I have used glue sticks in the past.

Leaves and flowers.

Wrap the egg with string or rubber bands.

You can wrap them like this with the onion skins wrapped around the egg or you can just wrap with the string before dyeing, each will give you different patterns.

Sticker patterns.

This is a new one for me, using stickers to act as a mask for the resist. It worked really well and I think it has a lot of potential when you look at all the different types of stickers that you can get.

The technique for all of these is as follows.

1 Boil onion skins in enough water to cover the eggs, you can use brown or red onion skins.

2 Remove the onion skins from the water and just leave the dye water in the pan.

3 Use any or all of the resist techniques above. Get an old pair of tights, clean of course, cut them into sections the right size to hold the egg. Knot one end, place the egg inside and knot the other end, do this for all the eggs.

4 Place the eggs in the dye water and boil for at least 10 mins, for a darker dye you can boil them for up to 30 mins, if you boil them for this length of time I don't think they will be edible!

Have fun.

Here are some pretty ideas that I found online.

Dye and decorate with paper flowers.



Use your egg shells as small vases.

And finally.

Beautiful, traditional Romanian easter eggs.

Have a great Easter all of you and do all of the things that you enjoy. I'm away for the Easter break so I will catch up with you when I get back.