Going Natural...or so I thought

Hello, Springtime. Today is gorgeous; I went on a little walk this morning and did my scripture study while reclining on the lawn. ESL classes ended this week, I think, unless someone else plans to do it during the summer.

I recently colored Easter eggs and decided to use non-store-bought dyes. Sweet Husby is usually game to go along with American holiday traditions, but didn't join me for this one because he had a lot of homework. So I only did two eggs to start and hope that maybe we'll both do more later this week.

Anyway, back to the natural dyes: I started by trying to boil the eggs in spinach, but they just turned a pale brownish yellow, even after I soaked them in the fridge for a few hours. So then I tried adding some curry to the spinach soup and it did add a few yellow/brown speckles to the eggs--but I still felt a little miffed about the utter pastel coloring it gave overall. Removing one egg, I started over with it by using a cold dye mixture of red grape juice, red wine vinegar, and chokecherry syrup. The resulting deep scarlet hue was glorious to behold, until I read the ingredients on the red wine vinegar and found out it had Red #40 in it. So much for going natural. To add insult to injury, I dried the egg by hand instead of patiently letting air do its job... all the deep red color came off in my napkin, and I ended up with a muted earth tone purply-pink as it was. This is the bottom egg in the picture. The top egg got to soak a bit longer in the spinach-curry soup, and then I finally used blueberries to give a nice marbly blue/brown effect. This egg resembles a dinosaur egg to me, and I like how it turned out.

Other natural dyes I would like to try: turmeric ( to get a deep golden yellow); onion skins (a different shade of gold/yellow); purple cabbage (strangely enough, reportedly results in blue).