Happy Day

This is one of the most beautiful Easters ever!



I dyed my Easter eggs with natural dyes again this year. Onion skins, red cabbage, and spinach. I used brown eggs this year, so the effect is not as striking.



The trees in Philadelphia are just going crazy! I swear this is the earliest I've ever seen the magnolias, cherries, and pears blooming.





Happy Spring!

Egg-dying, a bit late

Here's the much-anticipated natural egg dying tutorial I promised. I only got around to dying eggs with two of the natural ingredients, but I do plan on trying others in the future.

Here was the first try:


Carrot tops, onion skins, red cabbage, beets, and instructions from my amazing local food Co-op (which is practically in my back yard, I am so lucky). I followed the directions, but took the eggs out right after they had boiled. The correct time frame is below.

Instructions:

• #1 - chop all ingredients into 1-inch or smaller pieces, add to pot with enough water to cover eggs, bring to a boil
• #2 - add 1 T vinegar and raw eggs, boil eggs for ten minutes (or your normal hard-boiled egg timing)
• #3 - take pots off heat and let the eggs cool in the solution until room temperature or longer (I waited 24 hours)
• #4 - remove eggs from pots and use left over water to make stock or to dye fabric!

Results of the first try:

top left - carrot tops; bottom left - red cabbage; top center - onion skins; bottom center - beets

And here's the second try!



I only used red cabbage (blue) and carrot tops (olive green) this time, with white eggs. You can see that the chopped veggies leave a really cool pattern on the eggs, and you can use rubber bands to make other patterns on the eggs (this worked really well when I did it the first time around).

Which came first?

The Saturday before Easter I had a bunch of friends over to dye eggs. Much fun was had by all, and we ended up dying 6.5 dozen eggs! Amazing. It made me miss my sister and my friend Amanda from home, whom I've always dyed eggs with in the past.



We used synthetic dye that my mom mailed me from NJ (she knows me so well). But we also tried some natural dyes. They failed pretty much completely, but I think I know what I did wrong. Here's what they looked like this time around:



Top left: carrot tops, top center: onion skins, top right: beets, bottom left: red cabbage. (Some of the eggs started off brown anyway, so don't be impressed).

I'm going to try again, and then I'll write a tutorial.

Throw Your Hoe Down

This weekend I spent a fabulous day and night at the Hoes Down Festival at Full Belly Farm, the farm that sends me my CSA box every two weeks. There were a bunch of workshops and things that I was really excited to see, but I had to wait for my carpool people to be ready to go, so we got there at 2 pm and missed most of the things I wanted to see.



It was a lot of fun nonetheless, and I spent most of the time with my friend Andra in the kids craft section, making felted wool soap scrubbers and dying silk hankies with natural dyes (onion skin, indigo, etc.).





The festival is a "celebration of rural life;" there was sheep shearing, cow milking, workshops on how to raise chickens on a small scale (which I missed, grrrrrr), and all kinds of hands-on activities like bread baking, corn milling, weaving, etc. There was also a hay fort, which I held myself back from exploring because there were just too many kids.



But we couldn't stop ourselves from doing the grass maze.



There was also contra dancing, and great food and music far into the night. We camped out in the walnut grove and the stars were so intense that we could see the Milky Way.

Here's a video that I took of the contra dance. It looks a bit dishevelled because it is; there were just too many people and not enough space.