How you can Dye Easter Eggs Naturally - with a 2020 twist!

Lovely dreamers, today is a very calm day here for us. In other years, we would be either with my family and celebrating the Catholic and Hungarian Easter (that was last week), or with Andy’s family and the Orthodox Easter (that is today) and be surrounded by loved ones, a ton of food cooked by our grandmothers and mothers, laughter and love.

Related: Easter Menu – 5 Delicious Recipes for Newbies

But this year is different. This year, there’s only two. Us. Maya and Andy. Quarantine has made us change our tradition.

For today, we did have to make our own goodies from some homegrown ingredients we are thankful to have received, and from all that, we gathered throughout these past few months since we’ve moved back home to Transylvania.

But it’s still not the same. IT does feel like something’s missing.

The taste might be there, the smell might be there, but the only interaction we have with our families now is through our phones. Lucky for us, our grandmothers are not as afraid of technology as most people think about the elders of Transylvania.

We’re also lucky enough that they do understand why we weren’t there this year, even if they sometimes might be obsessively overprotective and clingy (for a lack of a better description). Do you know that meme about Balkan mothers that got a ton of popularity over the years?

Well, it’s right! That’s not just childhood or adolescence. It’s adulthood as well.

But let’s get back to today’s business.

Along with our new DIY with a twist we made for today, we’ve also tried for the second time to make bread. This time we followed along with a recipe by one of our most popular Romanian chefs, Chef Sorin Bontea.

It came out a little wonky, it doesn’t look nearly as good as his, but it’s quite good! Unlike our first try when we basically destroyed 1 kg of flour (an absolute crime, especially these days!), you can actually eat this one, not just use it as a prehistoric weapon.

But enough with the chit-chatting! Let’s get to it!

How you can DIY Dye Easter Eggs Naturally – with a 2020 twist!

And now, the business you’re all here for. These gorgeous Easter Eggs we’ve had so much fun doing!

While there are tons of other ways of decorating Easter eggs, like some we’ve showcased in older articles, this year we went differently. Quarantine got us stuck inside, and because we do try to be model citizens, we haven’t even left the house since February. Andy left out once for groceries and that was it.

That’s exactly why we had no egg colorants this year. But hey, we like to experiment, improvise and be creative. You might think: why not just paint them? Well, simply because “been there, done that”. This year we needed something different.

Related: 10 Amazing ways to dye Easter eggs this year

Enter the most forgotten and underestimated things you definitely have in your pantry right now: onion skins. Those dry crumbly things most people throw away with no other thought. You’d be surprised to know that not only do they make great tea (and very healthy I might add), but they are also used for many many years as a natural way of dyeing Easter eggs.

Our personal method of dyeing the eggs might be different from others, in one simple aspect. We boil the eggs with the onion skins from the start. The trick is to leave them in. Depending on what type of onion skins you have at your disposal (red or white), and the colour you are trying to achieve, you can leave them in anytime from 3 to 12 hours.

Our colouring was achieved in a little over 12 hours.

Make sure to add enough water to cover the eggs by an inch or so, but not too much as to dilute the colouring.

Pro tips:

1. Don’t forget to use at least a tablespoon of vinegar in the water. It helps the colour set on the egg. My secret is actually a tablespoon of vinegar plus a tablespoon (or more) of that juice you find in beetroot jars.

2. Rub some grease on them after you’ve taken them out of the onion skins “tea” if you want them to be nice and shiny and you’re done!

But how did we make them look so cute, you might ask?

Are they painted on? Did we stick them on? Is it Photoshop magic? Well… NO!

We, lovely dreamers, used one of the most amazing ideas Andy had: let’s engrave them. So that’s exactly what we did.

We used the laser engraver I got him for his birthday last year, and the result is absolutely FANTASTIC. Who knew you could do this with a laser engraver? And you could engrave anything you wanted. From Ravenclaw’s Crest to the one egg to rule them all, as long as you have patience and a window open, you can do anything.

All you need to know is that the designs need to be black and white vectors, to be able to be processed by the machine. The vectors can be made from photos using Photoshop, for example, or you can search for them online.

Great places to find free designs for personal use, of course, are:
– subpng.com
– toppng.com
– getdrawings.com
– vectorified.com

The important thing to remember is to set your imagination free!

Other natural ways of dyeing eggs consist of using things like turmeric, black coffee, purple cabbage, and beets. With these simple ingredients, you can make all the colours of the rainbow, including green, brown and blue.

This year we wanted to keep it simple, but we’re definitely going to expand for next year. With or without a lockdown.

We hope you enjoyed our little DIY experiment for today, and that you will try to dye Easter eggs naturally (with or without a 2020 laser engraver twist). If you did, make sure to share it, pin it, tweet it! We would really appreciate it!

Our question for you is: What colour do you dye your eggs?

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