Eggs of Easter

This year I wanted to try dying some eggs with onion skins, like my aunt Joan did (and maybe still does?) back in the olden days when we all got together at my great-grandma's house in Smithfield for an Easter Monday egg hunt and get together. I loved the natural, rustic looking eggs then, and I love them still. Last year, I thought I'd give it a try, but I didn't have any dried onion skins at the ready at Easter. So I started saving them so I wouldn't be lacking any come this year. I'm so glad I did! I found a couple of tutorials online that I sort of followed and sort of combined to make my own version. And it worked! I've never seen onion skin dyed eggs so vibrant and red! I was shocked and delighted! Such a fun little chemistry experiment for my morning.

First I boiled my bag of onion skins (I have no idea how many were in there,
but I'm guessing it was somewhere between 8-15 that the two websites suggested and they
were just your regular yellow onions)
 in 5 cups water + 3 TB vinegar for 45 minutes. Then I poured the dye through a colander
into a smaller pot (to get rid of the skins and make the liquid deeper for when I added the eggs).

In the smaller pot, I added the raw eggs
and boiled them in the dye for 20 minutes.
And that's it!
(I also tried dying an already boiled egg in a mug of dye
like I normally do with the little kits and that way worked,
too. It wasn't as dark as these, but the longer it was in the dye,
the darker it got, and even after it had been in the fridge for a while
it got darker still.)

Easy peasy! (Whoops - this one cracked in the pot, always a risk
when boiling eggs around here - look how freaky!)

But so pretty (reminds me of candy corn - oops, wrong holiday!)
on the inside when the peel is removed!
(and it tastes fine in egg salad, so no harm, no foul!)

But aren't they beautiful?!

I also hard boiled (actually steamed - my favorite method)
some white eggs for the kids to dye with their fizzy tablet kit.

Check out that monstrosity!
(I've never seen one ooze quite this much before!)

What the heck?! (Into the egg salad it goes!)

Dying at lunchtime (that's the egg salad sandwich
made from the rejects above on her plate!)

Happily making "rocks" out of all his eggs.
(They were double dipped in all the colors and
came out looking very rock-like. All the better for hiding,
my dear!)

I loved this gradient!
(FYI, the far left orangey brown egg was the one I dyed
in the onion dye without boiling - the rest are from the dye kit)

We got carried away and dyed a whole package
of non-boiled eggs while we were at it (a trick
I learned from my mom's cousin Sharon)!

The raw carton.

And the hard boiled carton. We're saving these for
Saturday for our Easter Egg Hunt!

A few days later . . . 

It was finally Easter weekend! My grandparents decided against hosting our traditional egg hunt at their house again this year (it's just a little too soon to be gathering the entire extended family at the end of a pandemic) so we planned our own in the yard again. We invited Gregg's parents to join us for hot dogs between General Conference sessions, so we built a fire and roasted our lunch and then kept the kids in the garage for a few minutes while we hid the eggs. We had so many eggs! Between the plastic eggs (I had bought a bag of candy to fill) and the hard boiled eggs we dyed on Tuesday, there were two dozen eggs for each child to find! (Plus Grandpa and Grandma brought treats to hide, too!)

Sorting her loot - her favorite part, I think!

Easter Sunday was lovely, too. We ate pancakes made by Cal and enjoyed Conference and colored Easter printouts I snagged from my young women activity this week. At lunch we ate egg salad sandwiches and asparagus outside. Then we went back in to watch another hour of Conference. We hopped in the car at 3:00 and headed to Providence for a backyard dinner with some of my family as soon as the last session ended. My mom had eggs for all the kids, too, so they got another hunt under their belts and we all had a wonderful evening visiting and eating and playing. (So wonderful that I didn't even take a single picture of anything besides the Easter egg sunrise that morning!)

Here's my coloring page (I don't know where Cal's
or Sam's are, and I don't think they even finished them).
We've been singing this song all week around here.
The eggs are fun, for sure, but it's all about this right here
that fills me with joy at Easter.
Tell it out with joyful voice! :D