It's always nice to post something personal about yourself, like your culture, but the reason I'm posting about it today is because of Easter. I'm referring to Czechoslovakia and Lithuania. As a kid, Easter was a VERY colorful time in my house.
This type of Lithuanian egg is dyed using brown onion skins. There are other natural ways to dye eggs but his is the way we did it every year. We would get a huge pot of water, add a few handful of onion skins that we saved up over the weeks, a touch of vinegar and placed the eggs in boiling water. The water would turn this beautiful spicy orange color and in time, dye the eggs. The longer you cook the eggs, the darker they would get. When the eggs were the color you wanted, we would take a nail and scratch patterns into the eggs exposing the white underneath.
These eggs are more labor intensive using wax and special tools. Although beautiful, I never had the patience to make any of these.
Many nations believed that the decorated egg had magical powers. Now go and make some magic with your family. The kids will love it!
Hi Donna,
ReplyDeletefor some reason I thought you were Italian, LOL!
In Russia, we too used onion skins to dye Easter eggs. But instead of scratching patterns on the dyed eggs, we did the following:
we attached a small leaf from a home plant to each egg (different type of leaf/plant for each egg), wrapped each egg in a nylon stocking and then boiled the eggs in water with onion skins.
The eggs came out brown, with light leaf patterns on them - soo pretty! :)
Yelena
Yelena - Italian by marriage only! I love the rich color of the eggs when they are done this way. This post brought back great memories!
ReplyDeleteMy mother used onion skins too! I love the organic feel of those eggs. The second photo is a drop-pull method using a pinhead stuck in a needle. You dip the pinhead in candle wax and then draw on the egg. These are the kind of eggs we created when I was young. They're much easier than they look! And much easier than using a stylus, a special tool to create pysanky (Ukrainian Easter eggs).
ReplyDeleteAren't they beautiful? I saw these all year long when I was going up. My parents are coming this Thursday for Easter and mom wants to dye some eggs from red onions. Fun!
ReplyDelete