How to make dyed and decorated Easter eggs

Good evening and Happy Easter!

As I'm typing this on Easter Monday I wanted to share with you my first experiment in making my own hand-blown and dyed eggs for Easter.

I tried a few different techniques, with various amounts of success and failure.

Yes, I am now bombarding this blog with pictures of a little Easter egg hunt...  with dyed eggs in my garden. I loved the bright colours of these against the different plants.

Yes it's another one!

This one would have been pretty good for Valentine's Day too. I liked this technique the best.

So, the techniques: these were all new to me, because I haven't done this kind of decoration before. I do have a vague memory of doing something similar with Mum when I was really little, using some german picture transfers - I wish I could still get them because they were wonderful. But in the absence of any of those, I did what every sensible person would do: go straight to the interwebs to consult the awesomely powerful font of all culinary and decorative knowledge, MARTHA STEWART.

And of course she had about a thousand techniques and designs and tips and tricks, which you can find here. Of course she did. She's Martha Stewart.

I purchased some crayons and some decals (stickers).

You can use boiled eggs, but they don't keep indefinitely so I thought it was worthwhile to 'blow' the eggs. Now, I definitely did this as a child with Mum because I still remember how. You make a tiny pierced hole in the top of a raw egg and a slightly larger hole at the base of the egg (I used the end of a corkscrew for both) and, holding the egg firmly, blow the insides of the egg out through the hole in the base. It's a bit like blowing up a balloon - at first nothing happens, then it works!

I washed out the eggs with warm soapy water and dried the, then tried the first technique: sticking various decals or stickers on the shell of the egg in whatever patterns you want. The idea is that you then dip the egg in dye, and allow it to dry before peeling off the stickers - where they have been will stay the original shell colour (which, because I use free range eggs, is brown rather than white).

These particular pink crystal decals were so pretty that they actually would have been really nice to stick on AFTER the egg had been dyed, and leave on - I guess if you get really pretty decals you should consider this option, because this particular egg looked less impressive after they were taken off than before it was dyed!

Then, put about 20 drops of liquid food colouring (or half a teaspoon of gel colouring) into a small bowl of hot water, with a teaspoon of vinegar. Not sure why the vinegar is needed, but I consider it generally dangerous to question Martha's judgement. I used a very expensive French tarragon and white wine vinegar, not because I wanted to, but because it was the only one I had. Goddamn waste of good salad vinegar. (Note to self: buy cheap vinegar and stuff in back of larder.)

Place the egg in the bowl and sink it until fully covered. The weird glass-on-top arrangement here is because I took ages to work out how to 'sink' the egg properly, and this was my first attempt - glass on top to hold the egg down.
(Second note to self: wear latex gloves to prevent your fingers getting completely dyed blue for days.)

I kept the egg in for about 10 minutes, although you can make a lighter shade by submerging it for less time. In my case this was hard because the eggs were so brown. Using very white eggs would have given me much more shading options, but you don't want a brown egg with a slightly blue tinge - you have to get the colour deeper for it to work.

This was how the egg looked after I took it out....

And this was how it looked after the decals came off. It's still pretty, but quite subtle, and not nearly as fine and precise as I had expected. This is partly the fault of the decals - they didn't always stick firmly and evenly to the shell, so some parts of the pattern came through better than others.

I still think, in comparing these two pictures, that the egg would have been prettier had I left the decals on. A thought for next time.

This is a pic of the different eggs I was preparing - the green, purple and pink diamante patterns are all decals but the heart was drawn on with a crayon.

The crayon technique worked beautifully and I want to do more in the future. You simply draw on the eggshell with a wax crayon, then dip and dye it. When it's dry, put it in a moderate oven for 5 minutes. You'll see the wax of the crayons begin to go shiny - take out of the oven and rub gently with a cloth, the wax will come off to expose the uncoloured parts of the shell underneath.

You can do names, as in this egg, or hearts, or just lines... so many options.

It doesn't matter what colour the crayon is because you will be wiping it off - but it's better to use a darkish colour because you need to be able to see what you've drawn during the drawing process.

A closeup of the heart egg. I really liked the graininess of the crayon and the homespun look of this egg.

This is another of the decal eggs. Again the pattern came out clearly but it was less precise and fine than I expected. Not sure how to avoid this (maybe use a better quality of decals?)

I loved the strong clear designs on this. This was the egg that you can see above with the purple flower stickers on it. These nice simple shapes worked really well.

Another, different technique is to wrap your blown egg in string or raffia before dyeing - it's quite difficult to tie it on securely - then dip it for a lined effect around the centre.

This egg was wrapped in raffia and dyed dark brown:

This was the result - interesting and better than I had expected, given that the raffia could be expected to just soak up the dye and transfer it to the egg, so I wasn't sure I'd get any sort of distinct pattern.

You could do a much clearer version of this with sticky tape if it was cut into very fine lengths.

That is the end of my Easter egg dyeing odyssey - Happy Easter from Dr Cupcake!