It’s coming up to Easter 🐣 so I thought I would try and get ahead of myself and write a little ‘How to guide’ on making these gorgeous patterned eggs.
We have an abundance of eggs as we keep free range hens. The white eggs work perfectly and the brown eggs work good too but it’s not as vibrant.
You will need eggs, flowers or leaves for the pattern, old tights, elastic bands or string, pans of water and dye. We have used natural dyes such as onion skins, tumeric, beetroot and red cabbage. You could of course use any food dyes you have for baking.
First you need to carefully place a flower or leaf onto the egg. Then place your tights around the egg and put an elastic band around the opening. It needs to be tight to hold your flower in place. If you want to do quite a few then you can use sections of tights with bands and string and both edges of the cuts.
Get your pan to the boil with all your natural dyes in.
Carefully place your eggs with their flower and tights on them into the pans. Let them boil for around 20 minutes.
Once they have boiled take the eggs out an let them cook. Check one and see how the colour has taken. You could always add it in longer if needed.
Unwrap your egg from the tights and carefully peel off the plant matter to reveal some gorgeous prints. These make perfect Easter hunt eggs or great just to decorate more. You can also eat the egg inside too.
Enjoy and let me know if you have a go. Hopefully we will get to make these at a class this year. A great Easter Activity. We love doing this at Forest School.
Forgotten Forest 