Earlier this month, the children of 57th Street Meeting heard a wonderful story about the origin of easter eggs & learned what traditional colors, patterns and shapes are meant to symbolize. This week, we completed the lesson by making our own easter eggs with natural dyes. For our young Friends, this was an exploration of reuse, repurposing, and surprising beauty.
Led by Joy Duncan, the first step was to boil our selected ingredients on the stove:
– red cabbage (color: purple)
– beets (color: red)
– onion skin (color: brown)
– turmeric (color: golden yellow)
…along with several tablespoons of Alum (the mordant Joy chose to use; read here about several alternative mordants you can use, some tips & tricks, as well as other suggested ingredients); 1 tablespoon of mordant for every 4 cups of water.
This is called the hot bath method: after you bring the water, ingredient & alum mixture to a boil, you then added raw eggs to each pot (i.e. color), cook for about 15 minutes and then remove from heat. For us, this timed out perfectly. We had started our morning together sharing “roses & thorns” (“joys & sorrows”) and then discussing the original form of each ingredient: the earthy brown beet, the paper-like onion skin, the aroma of turmeric, and the artisan patterns of the sliced cabbage. After going into the kitchen and adding the eggs, then playing while they cooked, we let the eggs steep while we headed upstairs to be among Friends for the break of meeting and left the eggs to sit covered (the longer you leave the eggs in the dye, the darker the color).
When we had learned about traditional colors and their meaning, we had discovered that brown meant “happiness”, purple meant “high power”, yellow meant “spirituality” and red meant “love”/pink meant “success” (note: our beets didn’t work very well, so its unsure color you would categorize ours… a pale red or a pink) –
I definitely think the children experienced happiness while making this gift of easter eggs to the Meeting for potluck. Everyone enjoyed them!
And as our Meeting continues to explore how to teach Quakerism to our children, we will explore the depths of meaning to seek understanding of a higher power (defined in so many different ways);
We are lucky to have each other in this spiritual community;
There is no question: we are teaching peace, practicing love, demonstrating respect (for each other and for our earth), and having enormous success in helping these Quaker children grow.
These were perfect colors for 57th Street Meeting.
Happy Easter.
Hi Friends,
One of the ways to color Easter eggs is to wrap the uncooked egg in a layer of onion skins, then wrap the thing in a piece of old sheet or other cloth you won’t ever need again, and tie some string securely around the whole thing. Drop the egg package in cold water, bring it to a boil…I forget how long, if I even knew when I was a kid. Probably Breeze’s 20 minutes is good. Take the egg package out of the water, let it cool, and unwrap the egg. You’ll have a yellow and brown marbled effect on the egg shell.
While I’m on the phone, so to speak, I’d like to suggest that telling kids the story of Jesus’ life and death …what he said and how he chose to live and die…is an important story all in itself. Never mind the resurrection part. I know that can be hard for others to swallow. I happen to have gotten acquainted with the living Jesus, alive and well and still in the business of changing lives. But, that’s my personal experience, and I’m not trying to foist it off on you and your kids. What I want to point out is that modeling oneself on Jesus’s life-choices cannot happen for a kid unless the stories about Jesus are told. You can tell stories about Gandhi, too, he’s a good person to model oneself on, too. But don’t protect your children from the good part of your own heritage, your own culture’s stories. I had bad experiences with churchy types too when I was a kid. But Jesus — Jesus rocks.
Dyeing eggs relates to peace…how?
Happy Passover, Friends! and a blessed Easter too, with or without attendant pagan ritual…
Thank you for the natural egg-dyeing instructions! This year is the first time in many years that I am not dyeing eggs, but plan to be back in the saddle next year, and hope to try these natural techniques.
I think it was great that you had this Easter egg project with the kids. It sounds like it was fun and light-hearted, and anything that brings a group together in community for a positive reason promotes peace.
Eggs, of course, are symbols of new life, and I think that egg-dying must have arisen to reflect the bright colors of spring after the long, cold, dangerous and dreary winter. Spring and the equinox are a time of rebirth, renewal, and the return of the light. But we need to have peace within to be able to experience renewal, not an easy task. The ancient traditions, whose beliefs have been obscured by time, but whose symbols still permeate the newer wisdom of Christianity, help to brighten up our hearts and to remember to have hope.
So, Happy Easter, Happy Passover, Happy Nowruz (Iranian new year,) Happy Higan (Buddhist spring equnox,) Happy Holi (Hindu spring festival,) and Happy Spring!
Dear Patricia & Pam –
Thank you both for sharing! Pam, I completely agree with you and it made me smile to read your comment: building community is so important to creating a culture of peace. And I feel that these natural methods are more friendly to the earth, fun while educational, and less commercial than buying a disposable kit.
My family read about some new colors to try this afternoon –
* We used canned pie cherries for red.
* We used turmeric for yellow (like last year).
* We used blueberry juice with red onion peel for blue/purple.
* We used frozen spinach for green.
Green didn’t work, but the other colors turned out great!
Additional links:
http://www.thekitchn.com/vibrant-easter-eggs-dyed-natur-112957
http://www.frontiercoop.com/learn/hs_naturaleggdyeing.php