Decorating eggs for Easter is one of my favourite traditions. This year, I made natural dye Easter eggs with pressed flowers and leaves. These natural dye Easter eggs are fun to make. It’s a process but you still have time before Easter Sunday! All you need are eggs, fruits and vegetables for the dye, and pressed flowers and pressed leaves to decorate the eggs. I used pressed wood anemones for my Easter eggs. And even though they are not perfect, I love how they turned out.
This was my first experiment in making natural dyes. I remember doing this as a child but since then I have always used a simple store-bought egg kit. In my DIY turquoise Easter eggs, I used an Easter egg kit to paint my eggs in lots of different shades of blue and green. For my Botanical Easter eggs DIY, I used egg dye and fern leaves. So I didn’t have any idea of how this year’s Easter eggs would turn out. This way of dyeing eggs is a bit more time consuming, but it was a fun project because the result is definitely a surprise!
Materials
Here is what you will need:
- White eggs
- Fruits and vegetables to create natural dyes, I used red cabbage and blueberries but you can also use onion skins
- A saucepan for each fruit or vegetable
- Pressed flowers and leaves of your choice, I used wood anemones
- Wallpaper paste
- A bowl
- A small paintbrush
How to make natural dye Easter eggs
- Put the chopped cabbage and crushed blueberries in separate saucepans. I used 3 cabbage leaves and a handful of blueberries.
- Add the eggs and just enough water to cover the eggs.
- Bring the water to a boil and then simmer for about 10 minutes.
- Let it cool and leave the eggs in the saucepan with the cabbage and blueberries overnight.
The red cabbage surprisingly gave me light blue eggs, the eggs dyed with the blueberries turned out brown. Not what I expected, but I am still happy with the result.
Pressed wood anemones
Now that the eggs are dyed, it’s time to decorate them. It’s best to use flowers and leaves that are small and flat, I used wood anemones from my garden. You can also use pansies, as I did in my DIY pressed flowers Easter eggs. The wood anemone is a pretty spring flower of ancient woodlands and is also planted in parks and gardens. They are part of the ranunculus or buttercup family. Its white flowers bloom between March and May. These pressed ones are from last year, the ones in my garden are just coming into flower. It has been really cold here, so they are later than normal.
How to decorate the eggs with flowers
- Mix wallpaper paste and water in the bowl, make sure it is not too thick.
- Carefully apply the wallpaper paste on the back of the flowers with the brush.
- Place the flower or leaf on the egg and use the paintbrush to gently smooth it onto the egg. Take a paper towel and carefully dab the leftover wallpaper paste. You can apply as many flowers or leaves to the egg as you like. I like to keep it simple.
- Let them dry.
Don’t they look pretty? Wishing you a Happy Easter!
