How to make the most beautiful Easter eggs

Easter is one of the most important and loved holidays in the entire Christian world. It is celebrated on different date each year - it's on the first Sunday after the first full moon of the spring. Easter put the end of the Lent and is followed by feasts and celebrations. Main symbols of this holiday are cross, hot cross buns, simnel cake, Easter bunny, Easter eggs.

Decorating eggs is one very old tradition, it comes even before the Christianity, and is a symbol of spring, new beginning and fertility. Usually are painted in bright colours like red, green,yellow, blue.
Nowadays in UK is more popular to exchange chocolate egg with friends and family but traditions are still alive in some parts of the country and people dye bird's eggs as most common are chicken eggs.
If you decide to follow the tradition and decorate real eggs for this Easter, you can check these methods for making beautiful Easter eggs.

First of all, you have to choose the eggs. Chicken eggs are perfect but you can add some quail or duck eggs to bring some diversity in table decoration after that. My advice is to choose eggs with white shell, this way the colours will be brighter. You have to hard boil the eggs, to avoid cracking due the boiling add a teaspoon of salt to the water.

Second important thing are dyes. if you are keen on natural way of living you can make your own with some vegetables and fruits.

For red or dark pink use beets - make juice and put the egg in it, the darkness of the colour depends of how long the egg will be in there.
 - Yellow onion skins - for this vegetable there are some methods to dye the eggs. You can put the flakes in pot with water , add the eggs and cover with water. Boil them together and will have from bright yellow to brown eggs according to the onion flakes and time of boiling. The other method is to wrap the eggs with onion flakes and put it in nylon stocking, tighten it and boil. After that the egg will covered with different shapes and variety of colour shades. Roll a wet egg on rice and wrap it with onion skins, boil it and the result is brown egg on white dots.

 

 - For beautiful lavender colour make juice from blueberries. If you haven fresh, you can use frozen too.
 - Cranberry juice is great for light pink.
 - Make awesome yellow - yellow green eggs make dye with turmeric - add a quarter water, a tbs vinegar, tbsp salt and 6 tbsp turmeric,stir and simmer until dissolved.
 - Make amazing robin’s blue with red cabbage. Chop some cups of it and boil it.
 - With spinach or other similar vegetables you can colour the eggs in green.

All these methods are natural and you can make really beautiful eggs using them but are time consuming and most of them requires to boil the eggs separately for any colour. Making the juice especially from beets can make you big troubles only the professional carpet cleaning company can deal with them.

The faster way to decorate Easter eggs is using food colourings. The most of them have instructions how to dye eggs, but the main rules are to mix the colour with warm water and add a tbsp of vinegar. If you stay the solution for some minutes the colours will become brighter. If one coloured eggs are too boring you can decorate them with different techniques.

 - Add one small flower, a sprig of parsley or dill and fix it in stocking, put the egg in the cup with dye, when you put it leave it to dry and when you put it out of the stocking the place where the flower was will stay white.

 - Draw something with old birthday candle or crayon on hot egg and colour it, the place where you draw can't be coloured because of the wax.  If you are good at painting you can use brush and liquid food colouring and draw something on your eggs - flowers, bunnies, chickens, the name of your beloved one - it's your choice. You can make funny faces on already dyed eggs with marker.

 - Some drops of vegetable oil in the paint will bring a marble effect to eggs. Dye it in one colour and put it in the bow with darker shade with oil drops in it for more beautiful result.

 - Cut a potato on two parts and carve some shapes to make a stamp - it may be dot or other geometric shape, leave, it will be great to make monogram too but be careful when cut it - it will be mirror in view when you transfer it on the egg. Cover the shape with paint and stamp it.

 - You can use temporary tattoos or stickers to make your eggs perfect.

 - Decoupage - this technique becomes more and more popular and it's not so hard but the results are flawless. There are special paper for decoupage but you can choose beautiful paper towels with small elements on them - flowers, cartoon heroes and so on. Stir one egg white and use it like a glue - but be careful if you spill it on the floor, wipe it immediately, otherwise floor cleaning will be almost impossible. Cut the elements in appropriate shapes, glue the egg with egg white and cover with the part of the paper towel you choose to use. Repeat till looks finished.

 - Use sponge and make spots with different colours. For multi colored eggs you can use cotton too - wrap the egg and wet the cotton with different colours or wet the cotton and after that cover the egg with it. Five or more minutes later you will have amazing streaky egg. If you wrap the egg in lace, cheesecloth or netting before that you will have a beautiful pattern on it after dyeing.

These are a small part of all techniques thanks to which you can make unique and very beautiful Easter eggs to surprise people you love with them.