Easter Crafting – Naturally Dyed Eggs with Onion Skins

My daughter and I took ourselves off for a few days during the first week of her Easter holidays to stay with my parents. We never get to visit as much as we would like during term time, so when the holidays come around, it’s the first place we make plans to visit.

During our stay, we noticed that my wonderful mum had been saving onion skins by the bin. Since my parents’ don’t have a compost bin in their kitchen, I assumed she had plans for the mountain of peel and soon we found out she had a lovely Easter crafting project for us to all do together.

Nature and crafting are two of my great passions, family is my primary focus, so to discover that we were going to start a creative project that my mum was taught by her mother, filled me and my girl full of excitement.

We set off into the garden on a glorious hot, sunny Spring day and collected a bowl full of Spring flowers and foliage, once collected we set about the project.

Each egg was wrapped with foliage, dotted with tiny flowers, carefully wrapped in old tights and tied with a rubber band. Once we were all happy with our collection of wrapped eggs we took them inside and put them into some water with the onion skins, salt and vinegar and left them to boil in the natural dye for some time, before heading back inside to see how they had turned out.

They were so fabulous; botanical imprints, with tiny details etched on each egg shell, creating wonderful patterns. Once we had dried them off carefully, we rubbed olive oil into the shell to make them beautifully shiny. This was such a wonderful project and just perfect for my little girl to learn about natural dyes and using nature’s treasure to create something really rather special for Easter.

We will definitely be doing this again; next time we plan to do as my grandmother often did and use different natural dyes to create a range of different colours. I also think, pressing the flowers and foliage for a few hours before wrapping around the eggs would make for a slightly less fiddly job and create a much more defined pattern.

If you want to give this fabulous project a go, I have shared the steps at the end of this post. Enjoy!

The Woodland Wife - Easter Crafting - Naturally Dyed Eggs with Onion Skins [kindred-recipe id=”3405″ title=”Eggs decorated with Botanical Imprints using Natural Onion Skin Dye”]