Easter is coming, which means it’s time to color eggs. Our hens are laying like crazy right now & we are getting at least a dozen eggs every day. I thought it would be fun to try out a couple different egg dye kits.

Hard Boiling Fresh Eggs

Hard boiling fresh eggs can be tricky. The shell tends to want to stick to the egg when you peel it. There are a variety of methods to try to fix that problem. The method that works best for me is adding 1 tablespoon of baking soda to the water. Farmer John prefers to steam the eggs.
Update: Recently, I too, have jumped on the steamed eggs bandwagon. The eggs really do peel perfectly. Click here to learn how to steam eggs.

Dye Kit #1

We’ve had these egg dying cups for years. It makes me happy to get them out each year. We have regular paas dye tablets in the cups.

Their fingers are usually just as colored as the eggs.

Our dark brown Marans eggs produced rich, jewel toned colors.

Dye Kit #2

The second kit we tried came with camouflage stickers. It also came with dye to color the eggs first. But, I just stuck the stickers on our brown eggs. I don’t love these eggs as much as I thought I would.

We’ve been incubating & hatching chicks, so naturally I had to take pics of them with the decorated eggs.

Dye Kit #3

The last kit we tried involved rubbing metallic paper on colored eggs. I love how they turned out, but the kit only decorated 5 eggs. There was one extra piece of metallic paper, but the glue was gone. I tried decorating the eggs first, before giving the metallic paper to my kids. It ended up being quite a chore for me to do it that I never ended up letting my kids try. So although they are pretty, they are not worth the effort.

My Favorite

When it comes right down to it, I don’t need the fancy dye kits. My favorite eggs are the one that are plain & only one color. Since the eggs from our chickens have a range of colors, one set of dye tablets produced a large variety of colors.

Wishing everybody a Happy Easter!

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Back in early August we collected plants, flowers, berries & leaves to try making natural dyes. It took us a couple days to complete the process, but we ended up with a variety of dyed goodies.

MAKING THE DYE

The first step was to collect the items we were going to use to make the dyes. I was so proud of this box. It’s full of nearly every color of the rainbow plus white & brown.

I was quickly disappointed, though. The blackberries turned into a nice purple color. Everything else turned into a tannish color. It didn’t matter if the original plant was green, yellow or purple. The dye ended up being a light tan. In the end, I’m happy with how everything turned out. But, at first I was a bit bummed. I thought since I collected a variety of plants, we’d have a nice variety of colored dyes.

The process is fairly simple:
• Collect plants
• Cut plants into small chunks
• Add plant chunks to pot. Add water. Ratio = 1 cup plant chunks to 2 cups water
• Simmer about 2 hours
• Strain mixture, if needed

This took me many, many hours because I was trying out so many different plants hoping to find one that produced a fabulous dye color.
My favorite dye: Blackberries

Alder leaves & cones

Thistles & foxglove flowers that were about the same shade of purple. They cooked down to a color of ugliness.

We ended up with 11 different dyes.

I made a chart to show the various dyes. It is lacking color variety.

PREPARING THE MATERIAL

I’m not sure that it was truly necessary to prepare the material since we didn’t have any awesome plans for our fabric. But I read you should prepare it so the dye holds better, so we did. I did two fixative baths – one for the blackberries & another for the other plants. Here are the recipes I used:

Salt Fixative (for berries)
• 1/2 cup salt in 8 cups water.
• Boil fabric for 1 hour.

Vinegar Fixative (for other plants)
• 1 part vinegar to 4 parts water.
•  Boil fabric for 1 hour.

DYING FABRIC, PAPER & YARN

The berry dye was awesome.

For many of the items we let them sit in the dye for awhile, hoping to collect as much color as possible.

The dying process was weird & almost boring for the kids. The berry dye was fun because you could actually see the color on the paper. The other dyes, although the color looked rich in the bowl, was almost invisible on the paper. You almost couldn’t even tell you dyed it. The paper just looked wet. So again, I was a little let down. Once the paper dried, though, there was a noticeable change in color, which was a fun surprise.

I got bored with the lack of color, so, I started flicking the paper for fun. You couldn’t even see the tannish drops when they were wet.

Again, I was so bored with the color, but loved the berry color. So, I grabbed a bag of blueberries from the freezer and added them to the blackberry dye hoping to get some contrast in our fabric & paper. Once again, when the dye was wet the blueberry dye didn’t look much different than the blackberry dye. But once dry, you can really see a difference. I guess patience is the key to this project.

Our dyed goodies:

Top Left: Paper pieces – possibly stationary for a thank you note or gift tags. We were just trying a variety of techniques to see what the results would be.
Top Right: Note cards dyed by the kids.
Bottom Left: Dyed fabric
Bottom Right: The kids also dyed white yarn. The results aren’t wowing, but they’ve been having fun adding the yarn to other projects.

MAKING NOTE CARDS

Just because the result was unexpected, I’m sharing this pic. Farm Girl  simply swirled glue on her card and left it. The reaction left this pretty blue color.

Their finished note cards.

This project didn’t turn out as expected, but I’m still thrilled with the results & we’ve used their dyed pieces a number of times on other projects. If you try it, I’d love to see what you and your family have come up with. The possibilities are endless.

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Is it silly that I’ve always wanted to do a covered wagon project? Well, silly or not, I finally had a good excuse to have the boys make their own covered wagons. We were studying the days of the pioneers. We just had to make a covered wagon to go along with that era… And to tell the truth, I was hoping to make an entire old west town out of cardboard. But, we ran out of time & now it’s time to move on to other subjects. Hopefully we can still make the old west town one day.

THE WAGONS

Farm Kid2 chose to add oxen. Love that.

The base of the wagon was a small cardboard box. They covered the box with strips of brown construction paper to resemble wood.

This is not a fancy craft. The hoops holding up the canvas are pieces of wire shoved between layers of the cardboard. As I’ve mentioned before, awhile ago we dyed paper, yarn & fabric. They used scraps of that fabric as the canvas on their covered wagon, which is why their canvas is tinted purple. We used the dyed yarn to tie the canvas to the covered wagon.

The axles & wheels are tinker toys & cardboard.

They were given cardboard scraps & paper to add details to their wagon, such as people & their seats.

I love how they added kids looking out the back like you see in pictures.

I’m really happy with how these turned out & the effort the kids put into making them. They seemed to have a great time with this project.

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