Adventures with eggs

With Easter being tomorrow, I needed to try my experiment using natural dyes to color some eggs. Here are what they looked like when I started. (They are hard-boiled.)

(Those are weird shadows on the white eggs from the cabinet above.)

I wasn't sure what to expect or it it was going to be worth the effort. A couple of days ago I tried using beets to color some eggs and this was the decidedly lackluster result. 

Not very exciting, huh? Today I decided to try yellow onion skins, purple onion skins, and tumeric. (2 cups yellow or purple onions skins or 1/4 c tumeric in 2 cups of water, boil for 10-15 minutes, drain out dye matter, set aside to cool. Add 1 tbsp white vinegar to dye.) Out of the three the purple onion skin dye looked the most interesting. 

Here are some eggs soaking in the dye. 

Yellow onion skins 

Top: tumeric, bottom: purple onion skins

And the final product:

L - R along bottom: yellow onion skins, purple onion skins, tumeric -- those are just blue eggs from our hens at the top, we needed a different color

It took about an hour to make the three dyes and another hour to dye the eggs. They had to sit in the dye for quite some time before they were a deep color. I think I like the yellow onion skins the best. The tumeric was a little odd to work with as the powder doesn't strain out. Plus, it really does turn everything yellow. 

There was one slight mishap. While the second dozen eggs were sitting in the dye, I was putting away some clean dishes. As I was hanging up our very large wok on the hanging rack above the counter I was working on, I thought it was on its hook, but it wasn't. The (very large) wok went crashing down bouncing off the counter (and drying, dyed eggs) and into the floor. Would you believe I only lost two eggs? One fell to the floor, the other just broke apart on the counter.