Hello Friends!
I hope everyone is having a great weekend and enjoying this beautiful sunny day. I know I sure am! I even went on a drive today, to at least get out of the house for a few minutes, because the stir-craziness is real people. However, blogging and crafting/baking have taken up a good bit of my time, so that has made each day pass by fairly quickly. It has also been good, because then I have things to blog about! Especially because fun creations and ideas are meant to be shared right?
The most recent activity in my household was in celebration of Easter. Just because everything has shut down or stopped, doesn't mean that we can't still continue with holiday traditions. This tradition is one that I'm sure many families do, dying eggs. This is a really important tradition in my family, not just because it's fun to dye the eggs, but also because everyone is crazy about those deviled eggs that come from our boiled and dyed Easter eggs. So every year we boil eggs, dye them, and then make deviled eggs (or angel eggs as my family calls them). This year we did something a little different though and I was very pleased with the outcome! Normally when dying eggs, we use food coloring from a pack or from what we have in the kitchen. This year we used foods or spices, for example...
-Raspberries for red or pink
-Red Cabbage for blue (isn't that crazy?!)
-Tumeric (a type of spice) for yellow
-Parsley for green
-Coffee for brown
I had never done this before, because like I said before, I'm use to using food coloring. So this was a great experience and they actually turned out way better than I expected. It was such a great reminder that we can do anything with the resources that the earth provides us with and I'm talking about the resources that grow from the ground. So many things can be done with fruits and vegetables that we never thought of, such as dying Easter eggs.
It was also really great, because everything that we used can normally be found in the house (or at least these are all common in my families houses). To make the dye, each of the products (mentioned above) were placed into individual sauce pans and cooked on a medium heat with water that was just above the item that was added to the pan. For instance, if you put in 2 cups of raspberries, then add water so that it just barely fills the pan and goes above the raspberry (I'm not a food blogger, so I don't know the correct term for that, but I'm sure you all will understand). The individual items (with the water) were then "boiled" for 30 minutes, strained, and then pourer into small bowls (each color into a different bowl). Three tablespoons of vinegar were then added to each bowl and BOOM! The egg dye was finished!
After that, the eggs were boiled and chilled. Once the eggs were ready, they can then be set in a bowl of the colored dye. Now if you want a bright color, you should leave the eggs in a LONGGGG time...like 2 hours. My family, however, was impatience and took them out in 30 minutes. The color still came out, but they were more pastel colors, instead of really bright colors.
A picture of the outcome is below! I've also labeled all of the dyes so you can see what each item did after it was boiled and strained.

As you can see from the picture above, the all natural dye worked really well and made some pretty Easter eggs. I'm sure the color would have been much brighter/darker if we had left them in the dye longer, but I was still really happy with them.
Well, thanks for reading about my Easter fun! I hope you all have a blessed day tomorrow and a great time with your family.
Bye for now!
Talia Gallagher
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