Color and Decorate Beautiful Easter Eggs {Without Design Skills or Artificial Colors} : Italian Recipe Book

Since I was a kid, Easter time was always filled with festive preparations in our family.
The coloring of eggs was certainly one of them.
And for me, as a kid, it’s been the most fun.

With modern substitutes like chocolate eggs or plastic eggs filled with confectionery sweets one has a lot of choices.
But to me, the oldest tradition to color and decorate chicken eggs before Easter still remains magical.

In my family, year after year we are using the same, very simple, natural and yet sophisticated technique of naturally dyeing and decorating the eggs.

You do NOT need any design skills, store kits or artificial colors.
Yet, once you are done, NONE of your eggs will look the same.

All natural ingredients that cost pennies or nothing at all.
And a few somewhat weird tools that you most definitely already have.

And today, I’d like to share this technique with you.

Here’s what you need:

4 packed cups of Yellow Onion Skins
Dozen or more WHITE Eggs
Old sheer tights
Fresh Green Leaves/Flowers that you can pick outside
Thread or Cooking Twine

How to do it:

We’ll start with the weirdest thing. Cutting the sheer tights 🙂 Of course, using old sheer tights I highly recommend you pre-wash and dry them before using. I usually save a pair or two throughout the year, so that I have just enough to work with when Easter comes.

Pro Tip: Depending on how often you use onions, a few weeks/month before Easter preserve some onion skins as well.

Cut stockings into pieces of 5-6 inches long, and cut the stocking pieces in half.

Straighten a leaf so that its pieces are well separated from each other to have a better definition of the imprint.

Place the leaf on the egg and coming from the top cover it with a well stretched piece of stocking. Tighten and secure the ends with a thread.

NOTE: you do NOT need to hard boil the eggs beforehand. They’ll cook while coloring.

Repeat the same process with the remaining eggs.

Place onion skins in a saucepan. Place the eggs on top of them. Add cold water just to cover the eggs. Put on high heat and cook as you would normally cook the hard boiled eggs (for about 10 minutes).

Set the saucepan aside and the eggs cool in that onion liquid for 3-5 hours.

TIP: If you don't have enough time, remove the eggs right after they’re cooked, but letting the stay in the liquid for a few more hours will give them a more intense color.

Pill off tights and leaves to reveal your beautiful Easter Egg.