Easter Disaster: My Bad Luck Brian Moment: Let's Talk Happy by Martina

I had such high hopes for this project!

I have spent hours browsing Pinterest, drooling over all of the gorgeous Easter eggs, dyed with all-natural dyes into gentle shades of all the colors of the rainbow. The process seemed so simple and the result looked absolutely stunning, so I decided to give it a go.

It did NOT turn out how I expected.

This post was intended to be a tutorial on how to make beautiful, naturally dyed Easter eggs.

Instead, it is a tutorial on how NOT to make beautiful, naturally dyed Easter eggs.

I boiled the eggs in a big pot, full o'water (duuh!). In the meantime, I filled four cups with half a litre of boiling water, five tablespoons of vinegar, and dye of choice (I used coffee, brown onion peels, blueberry juice and powdered pepper, all of which seemed to work just fine in every other tutorial on this planet).

It started well. The water was a pretty intense color so I thought the eggs would be too. Not too intense, of course, but at least ... distinguishable from one another.

I waited a couple of hours, and then I carefully started taking them out. You should have heard my squeal of delight when I held in my hand a gorgeous, vibrant purple egg, only for it to turn into a yelp of horror when the gorgeous, vibrant purple started peeling right off! What have I done?

Pretty much the same thing happened with the orange eggs (the ones swimming in onion peels), while the powdered pepper had little to no effect on the color of the egg. The only ones that came out how I expected were the coffee ones, which turned a deep brown. I think I used too much vinegar with the blueberries and the onion peels.

Brown was, apparently, the order of the day, because all of the eggs seemed to take on some shade of it.

Easter eggs using natural dyes. || talkhappybymartina.blogspot.com

See what I mean? Everything is just brown, except the blueberry ones. When the purple had peeled off, I put them back into the dye in the hopes that they would absorb at least some of the color. The result can be seen above. The word that comes to mind ... Sickly.

Still, I wasn't gonna throw a couple of hours of work (and a dozen perfectly good eggs) away just because of a bad dye-job. I knew these little disasters had beautiful Easter eggs hiding in them (deep, deeeeeeeep down inside), they just needed a little bit more work. So, I took my trusty black marker and some gold leaf, and hopped to it!