I really enjoy family traditions. One of my traditions from my family of origin is Easter-Egg Coloring. It's not just using tubs of dye to dye eggs:
It's also using onion skins and items from nature to color eggs
This is Latvian Egg Coloring. I grew up doing this. Every Easter Saturday, we (my family: Mom, Dad, Sister, and Omamma [Dad's mom]) would sit at the same table and make each egg an individual artwork. It's so exciting to put leaves, grass, three-leafed clover, pear blossoms, grape hyacinths, forsythia blooms, baby oak leaves, and all kinds of materials on the egg, wrap it up, put it in the dye bath, and then...unwrap the egg and see how it turned out! Woo!
We colored eggs yesterday. Ian was there, and SisterinLaw A came for a visit so she could color eggs too, and her friend A was also there. It was such a nice time. It's a great season (springtime) for turning on pleasant music, opening the windows, covering the table with accessories for this art project, and do it together.
3 comments:
Very pretty! How did you wrap the leaves on so they would stay while you dipped it in the dye?
The leaves and stuff act as stencils, blocking out the onion dye. Sometimes they also put their own color on the egg, since the onion dye water is boiling.
To keep the leaves and stuff against the egg, you wrap the egg+leaves in cloth (we've found that old undershirts work really well) then wrap that in thread. It makes a tidy package. With several people doing eggs all together, you use different colors of thread to differentiate whose egg is whose when you fish them out.
I'll have to post a better tutorial...but I don't have a digital camera so everyone will have to imagine the steps...like in the olden days.
Krista,
Those are beautiful! What a lovely tradition.
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