Hello everyone and welcome to another post about traditional egg coloring for Easter. Serbian Orthodox Easter is this Sunday, April 24th which means today is Good Friday and a day when eggs are being colored. Every year I share how me and my family do it so I thought I would keep sharing it... :)
Since we have our own chickens, every year we collect eggs for Easter and buy some extra if we need it. We do color A LOT of eggs, these ones on the photo are just a glimpse of them.
We also save onion skin/peel as this is our favorite way to color eggs plus it's completely natural and safe. This is how my grandma used to do it in times when there was no egg dye and my mom remembers it when she was a child and kept doing it until this day.
All kinds of plants, grass or flowers can be used for decoration - place it wet on the egg, wrap it with tights and tie with a piece of string.
We have this very old deep pot just for the purpose of egg coloring so we do one layer of onion peels then a layer of eggs then onion peels again until it's full.
This year we tried another similar technique - first we made sure the egg is wet, then we put some smaller onion peels on it, when it's wet it sticks better and then we wrapped it in gauze. We cut square gauze pieces, wrapped each egg and secured it with string. This should give each egg marble looking effect.
Last layer of onion peels and it's ready for cooking! It does take a little bit longer to cook all these eggs since the pot is bigger but it's also easy to do most of them in one go.
Here are some red eggs, it is also part of the tradition to color red eggs first and save one until next Easter - the old one is usually buried under the tree in the backyard and this is repeated every year.
We also had some green dye so we thought we would use it up and even though eggs turned out a different color (teal I guess), they still look pretty. We didn't get any stickers or anything, maybe it would be more fun but I also like to keep it simple like this. :)
These are some eggs that my niece and nephew did with stickers. They also painted with crayons on some and then we put it in the pot with onion peels. It's fun for them to participate in this tradition and I hope they will remember it when they grow up.
Here's more that my sister-in-law, niece and nephew did, like I said we color A LOT of eggs, haha. They do it with egg dye and stickers so we have a good variety of traditional and more modern techniques, I guess. :D
And here is our final product! Once the eggs cool down a little bit, we take a piece of cloth and some oil (just regular vegetable oil) and rub each egg to give it a shiny look.
For Sunday we will also prepare a nest, just a basket with some fresh grass and put some gifts and sweets for my niece, nephew and my little neighbor and we are ready for Easter. I like how the eggs turned out and I am happy I got to keep up this tradition me and my family share, I always do it with my mom since I was a kid and it's a special memory for me.
