Spring Equinox

In honor of the first day of Spring, our family had our annual Equinox egg hunt with natural plant dyed eggs.

I looked through this book we got at our Waldorf school store a couple of years ago called “Decorating Easter Eggs” by Thomas and Petra Berger, and got all kinds of elaborate ideas involving dried flowers and leaves, but in the busy pace of life, decided to stick to our traditional vegetable dyes. I simply boiled the eggs for six minutes in the dye bath, then took them off the heat, poured in a little vinegar, and let them sit in there to soak up the color for about 20 minutes. I was very pleased with the rich colors that came out.

Yellow onion skins with turmeric for golden yellow.

Beets for pink.

And purple cabbage for blue.

These didn’t look colorful enough to me, so I added some frozen blackberries and they turned a lavender purple. You can see the one blue one in the middle there, and there is actually quite a difference in color.

Last year I did a few more colors, and you can read the post I wrote about it here:

 Plant and Veggie Dyes for Colorful Spring Eggs.

The kids woke up to an egg hunt in the house for eggs nestled in these little chicken egg cozies made by my great grandmother. We’ve got nine of them in a rainbow of colors, and they come out every year to hold treats and treasures from the Spring Faeries. I’m not much of a knitter, but this looks like a really fun project to me.

Then we went outside for an egg hunt around the yard, ending at the Spring bunny’s nest. This year it was in our wheelbarrow, which seemed very fitting with how well-used it’s been lately. All these eggs are going to make some delicious egg salad sandwiches and devilled eggs in the coming week. With the shift in the season, and longer days for our chickens to roam around eating bugs, we should be having a lot more eggs all around!