Ombre Eggs by the Dozen

This year, I had aspirations of dyeing Easter eggs the natural way. In theory, this meant using beets to achieve a lovely shade of pink. Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way. I let the eggs soak and soak in the dye, but they barely reached a blush and the color came right off when you touched an egg. To boot, the whole apartment smelled like boiled beets. I think it must have come down to the proportions I used, so if anybody has tried this before, I'd love to hear your tips. I'll keep them in mind for next year.

I decided not to give up on my dirty dozen eggs, so I ran to the drugstore, bought a package of PAAS egg dye, the old stand-by, and proceeded to color my eggs, after wiping off the beet juice, of course. I wanted the eggs to be varying shades of the same color, a sort of ombre effect when you look at all of them. To achieve the different shades, I just kept the eggs submerged in teal dye for varying lengths of time. For the darkest eggs, I dyed them blue first, let them dry then dyed them teal.

After the false start, I'm really happy with how they turned out. It was tempting to use all those colorful tablets to get a rainbow assortment, but I love the monochromatic look of these when they're all nestled together. It brought a little sophistication to my otherwise basic dye job, not to mention better and brighter results than my sad little beet eggs.