Dyeing Eggs with Onion Skins

We spent the morning dyeing eggs to bring to church for Pascha (which is this Sunday). The tradition is to dye the eggs red, but there really isn't a good way to get eggs really red without using yucky dyes that come off on your fingers when you handle them. Last year we came across this natural way to dye the eggs and it's my new favorite. I've been saving onion skins for several months, and we've saved up several dozen of our own eggs just for the occasion.

Here are the eggs before


and the bags of onion skins (yellow ones)


I made the dye first by boiling the skins


Here is the strained dye cooling before I poured it on the eggs


These are the eggs after boiling in the dye


The finished product, I really like the dark reddish brown color.

New Baby Chicks

We ordered four new chicks for this year. They are "easter eggers" which means they will lay very pretty blue-green eggs. As an added bonus, they have very cute puffy cheek feathers. They came in the mail four weeks ago, so this is a bit late, but here they are:

This is what they looked like when they came out of the box


This was last Wednesday, when they were 3.5 weeks old, and we took them outside for the first time


they aren't little puff balls anymore, but they're still really cute


they let the girls handle them


the girls named this one Turtle, she's the sweetest


this one is Sunshine, we think she will be white


and this is Bean


and Ivy


Anna with Turtle on her lap


The big chickens are spending most of their time in the pen we built them these days because they like to tear up the garden beds and we have seedlings in them now. :)


We are busy working on plans for a new improved coop so they will be more comfortable when they are all outside full-time.