The presenter did a quick over view on the history of the Easter Egg, meaning of the colors, and old folk lore regarding luck of the Easter egg. Some things I knew and others things were new to me.
The Easter Egg symbolizes spring and a time of rebirth, going back to medieval times. As with everything it has it's roots in paganism.
The colors mean:
White - purity
Yellow - youth and happiness
Orange - Strength
Blue - Good health
Red - passion
She mentioned a few other colors but I couldn't get them all down:( I am sure you can find this on the web somewhere if you are really interested.
An old Folk lore regarding Easter eggs - if you crack an egg on Easter and it has 2 yolks you will have good luck for the rest of the year:) She also told a story of the Virgin Mary tears coloring eggs. It was a story I had not heard before but I found it here.
Next, we got busy dyeing our eggs. We used Beet juice, coffee, tea, turmeric, black berries, pomegranate juice, jello, blue berries, boiled onion skins
Some of the methods were done using hot liquid
Other methods were using cold liquids. The amount of time you left the egg in the liquid depended greatly:0
The eggs the presenter brought in as samples, aren't the colors pretty:)
Little Man and I tried to imprint a leaf pattern on one of our eggs
Step 1: find a leaf that fits the egg
Step 2: wrap the egg and leaf in cheese cloth and firmly tie it off...we used rubber bands to hold the cheese cloth in place
Step 3: add egg to liquid and let sit a few minutes. We added this egg to the yellow onion skins:)
Step 4: unwrap the egg and admire your egg:)
Another interesting method was rubbing black berries directly onto the egg shell. while messy it had good results and a light purple color
Princess was there but spent most of her time with my mother so I didn't get as many pictures. But here is her egg completed.
Little Man's final results. We had a total of 18 eggs colored using this method of natural dyeing.
We had a lot of fun trying this method and I think we will be experimenting with this again next year. It was so much fun seeing what worked. I found quite a few natural egg dyeing recipes on the web that we can try next time.
I hope you had a very lovely Easter with your families:)
Cool! I wanted to try using natural dyes this year, but the Little Miss didn't want to color eggs! That is so cool that they had a lecture about the history of Easter. I would have loved to have heard that. I had no idea that different colored eggs symbolized different things. I have never seen an egg with two yolks. I wonder what happens if you find such an egg any other time of the year....
ReplyDeleteI am pretty sure that certain types of chickens lay double yoke eggs, they taste the same as normal eggs though, we've has them many times :) they do look pretty cool though.
DeleteOne of our Easter eggs had a double yolk inside when we peeled it on Sunday so hopefully it means a year of good luck for us:)
DeleteSurprised you have never had a egg with two yolks I get at least one a year:) but not usually on Easter Sunday:)
This comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteBeautiful eggs! What fun, thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeletethe leaf one is so neat!!
ReplyDeleteI love this idea. I think next year we will have to color our eggs naturally. Thanks for the history lesson too. I was actually wondering where the idea of easter eggs came from.
ReplyDeleteWow, these came out really nicely! I had never heard of doing egg dyeing this way. I think we'll do this next year, for sure! Thank you for sharing and explaining.
ReplyDeleteAfter seeing so many posts on naturaly dyeing, I'd love to try this next year! They turned out beautiful!!
ReplyDeleteAndrea