With next week's Feature Friday falling in Good Friday (I may not be posting that day), I thought it would be fun to pass on some ideas for decorating Easter eggs.
For a lot of people - especially living where I do - the first thing that comes to mind when it comes to decorated Easter eggs are Ukrainian Easter eggs. The wax resist style of egg decorating, however, is common to the entire region, each with their own traditional designs, as well as common symbols and themes. Here are some other samples.
Hungarian
Polish (wood eggs)
Lithuanian
Romanian
German (egg tree)
Russian
Czech
I'm sure I'm missing many others!
Wax resist is just one way to prepare eggs for baskets. Eggs can be dyed with basic food colouring, plus there are a variety of natural dyes that can be used as well. A favorite of mine is making kraszanki, dyed with onion skins. This year, I'd like to try my hand at making drapanki with some of them.
A range of materials can be used to dye eggs in various colours. Different methods will give some lovely results.
Eggs can also be beaded, or carved. Here are a couple of beaded eggs I made, plus a couple of temari eggs.
For some lovely peeled eggs, I like to make Dragon's Eggs, a variation of tea dyed eggs. The eggs are first boiled for about 15 minutes, then allowed to cool until they can be handled. The back of a spoon is then used to gently crack the shells all over before they are returned to a pot of water, together with:
3 T black tea
1 T Chinese five-spice powder
1/2 C soy sauce
1 tsp sugar
The eggs are then cooked for another 3 hours.
Have fun trying some of these ideas out!
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