Its egg time and we usu­ally do some­thing. Usually we dye eggies the old fash­ioned way, with egg dyes. Then we may stick some leaves or what­ever we find around the house and make pat­terns on them while col­or­ing. But that has been the extent of our cre­ativ­ity. Not bad, but it always can be improved. Right?

I have stum­bled upon this tech­nique for dye­ing eggs with silk men ties that looked promis­ing. So after dream­ing about it for a few years I decided its time to actu­ally try it and get it out of my head.

The recipe:

100% silk ties

eggs

white vine­gar

hosiery

How: Use blown or raw eggs. Wrap the silks (face down) around the eggs tightly. Cover with another mate­r­ial. Boil in water (+ non metal­lic pot) with 1/3 cup of white vine­gar for 20 min.

So I went on silk ties hunt at the op shops. The peo­ple who have posted about their expe­ri­ence with this adven­ture are mostly from the States and they seem to be able to find ties for cents. Here, we are not so lucky. I spent about 3–4 dol­lars on each. But I became extra pro­fi­cient at rec­og­niz­ing silk sim­ply by feel, which was won­der­fully sat­is­fy­ing. I count the extra money as some sort of edu­ca­tion, self improve­ment, extra skill build­ing activity.

Then eggs.

Do you know that it is almost impos­si­ble to find white eggs around here? I say almost, because I am sure I have seen some at an obscure farmer’s mar­ket some­where, so they exist. After vis­it­ing just about every shop I could and being faced with only brown eggies, I gave up and just chose the light­est I could find.

First night — blow the eggs. I had never done that before, so here is another skill I acquired. 4 eggs bro­ken, but I got quite good at it by the end.

Second night — open up the ties and cut out the tags. Separate the insides and make a nice pile with them ready to use.

I was ready.

Day 3 — morning.

Silk tie eggs here I come. And I took over the kitchen bench. I offered the kids to wrap with me, but their Lego fun won over my hosiery one. I admit, I was happy about that. This part is a bit finicky.

Other peo­ple use big pieces of silk and pull them over one end and tighten it all there. I thought I had a bet­ter idea. Use as lit­tle mate­r­ial as pos­si­ble, wrap it around the thick part of the egg and then fold each end gen­tly. I picked up the clue to wet the silk before hand as it makes it very easy to stick to the egg and avoid air bubbles.

See, very lit­tle extra material.

Then I use the innards of the ties to tighten and secure the silk on the egg.

Here they are:

As I have the egg with the silk over it nice in my hand I start to over­lay it with the long white mate­r­ial — basi­cally wrap it like a mummy, pay­ing spe­cial atten­tion to the ends where the silk is scrunched up. The rea­son you want the silk to be touch­ing all of the egg is because if it doesnt, than the ink will not trans­fer and you will be left with undyed bold patch.

After that I use the hosiery to tighten the whole thing even more. And I end up with…onions, as the girls declared them to be. You see I tried to wrap with string on the out­side but that was not that good of an idea, so dont do it.

Next the pop­u­lar recipe calls for a non metal­lic pot to cook the con­coc­tion in. I have noth­ing like that. All my pots are stain­less steel. Then I remem­bered the — slow cooker! And I dug for it. And since peo­ple have sug­gested that the dyes that are released may be toxic, I took my cook­ing lab­o­ra­tory out­side to avoid any pos­si­ble fumes and mess.

My blown eggs dont sink, so I had to be inventive.

Here too I ignored Martha (I think this idea was first shown on her show). She called for 20 min of sim­mer­ing in water with some vine­gar in. After read­ing about many failed attempts at this tech­nique, I had to ensure my suc­cess by any means pos­si­ble. I left the slow cooker on for more than an hour. Then I switched it off and we went out for the after­noon. About 4 hours after that I took the eggs out and then another 30 min after that I couldnt wait any more.

I called the troops and held my breath. I was not gonna be a happy camper if all this work didnt reward me with at least some­thing nice. Even a lit­tle bit. One egg, thats it, one beau­ti­ful egg is all I ask for.

Now the girls were excited. I couldnt hold cut the hosiery fast enough.

This was the best part!

The sus­pense, the not know­ing if it worked, how it worked, which col­ors trans­ferred. With each egg it was like a mini Christmas morn­ing. FUN!

And here are the dif­fer­ent pat­terns we got:

We were ecstatic!

All the dyes trans­ferred and every egg was patterned.

Here are a few with the ties I used to give you and exam­ple of what results can be expected:

We have fur­ther plans for these lit­tle beauties.

But for now I am relieved. It worked!

We enjoyed it so much that now I will have to always check the ties at the op shops and I think this will be def­i­nitely some­thing to be enjoyed around this time of the year.

Continues here — fol­low me.

.

.

Stick around and browse sim­i­lar posts:

1. Making things better