Those Natural Easter Egg Thingies

Remember this pin?

Remember how when you clicked on it to get the awesome instructions to make these beautiful eggs to grace your own house and found that the site was in Chinese? Remember how disappointed you were? 

Well, I'm here to rescue your Easter. 

Yep, I did it :) I'm pretty proud. 

I was a little nervous to try these, since no one in my house likes hard-boiled eggs. So, essentially, any that I did would just be decoration; not very frugal, but oh well. I had a few different attempts and the photos in this post are from 2 different tries, so that's why they look a little different. Ok, here we go:

First thing is to collect the plants/leaves/flowers that you want to dye onto your eggs. Northern Nevada isn't exactly blooming with plant life, so for my first attempt I used... sagebrush. Fail. Lol. Whatever. For subsequent attempts I went to Walmart and bought a bouquet of flowers and used the plant matter from that.

Second step (this one's a bit tricky): Getting your plant matter to stay on the egg. I used an 11"x11" square of netting to keep the stuff in place while boiling; the hard part is getting it to stay while you put the netting on. The most effective way I found was to wet both your egg, and whatever you're putting on the egg; that way the water kinda bonds things together.

Ok, so put the plants on and wrap in netting

Then tie with string. This needed an extra pair of hands. A trusty roommate, husband, or neighbor can do the trick. The thing to remember here is that the netting needs to stay tight on your egg and the knot in the thread needs to stay. I would recommend using quilting thread because it's stronger. I broke several threads while trying to get a tight knot. If you don't have any around, regular thread will work, too. 

Trim everything so it's a nice little poof on top. 

This is what my last attempt looked like right before they went into the pot. 

Ok, so I did some research on natural dyes because I wasn't entirely sure what to use. I found out that pine tree bark gives you about the same color (sorry, no pictures of it). BUT it has this waxy substance that comes out while boiling and gets all over your nice new pots :(. It gave a cleaner picture of the plant, but the color would rub off after coming out of the pot. Anyway, the best thing is onion skins. I just happened to have about 4 onions that had started sprouting so I used the skins from those. You probably don't have onions just laying around, so over the next couple of weeks, collect the skins as you use them around the house. 

The onions sins give a really nice, rich dark red color in about the same amount of time that it takes eggs to boil. 

This is what they look like when they come out. 

 I used an old toothbrush to get the plants off. They get pretty stuck.

And here is the finished product! 

So the onion skins don't quite give you a white picture of the plant when you're done; it's more of a light yellow, but I still like the way it looks. 

You'll probably have a wider selection of spring plants to choose from. Just go out in your backyard and see what's blooming. 

They're pretty :)