Introduction: Dye Easter Eggs With Rubber Bands and Onion Skins!

About: Trained in science and law but do my best work in food and crafts. I am always trying to learn new things and keep it interesting!

I will teach you how to dye your easter eggs with rubber bands and onion skins to make really unique, classy, and sort of traditional easter eggs. It's very quick and simple, too!

This method turns white eggs into a lovely brown with the rubber bands acting as a resist. Onion skins are a traditional dye method for easter eggs in much of Eastern Europe, and they have been used to dye other things since onions were discovered.

This is my first Instructable, and my entry for the Rubber Band Contest, so please vote if you like it!

Step 1: Materials: Save Your Onion Skins!

For this type of egg dyeing you will need a good amount of onion skins, so you should save them periodically as you cook with onions. You can put them in a paper bag, which helps some of the inner skin layers to dry, or just stuff them into a hard container, which helps you to keep a lot of them in a compact space.

You will need:

Onion skins - a good amount, enough to loosely fill your pot. Less will make your eggs a lighter shade, which is ok too.

Eggs - Why not do a lot at once? They have to be white though.

Rubber Bands, all shapes and sizes

Pot (for boiling your eggs and onion skins)

Step 2: Rubber Band Your Eggs!

Put your rubber bands around your eggs. Any old way, any old rubber bands. Try to make 'em all different, so you can see how all the different methods come out afterwards!

Step 3: Boil Your Eggs

Put the onion skins in your pot, get them wet, and hard-boil your rubber-banded eggs in it. Use as many onion skins as you can reasonably fit under the water with the eggs.

Some people boil their eggs by putting them in once the water is boiling. For this, I think you will get better results if you start with the eggs in the water with the onion skins, turn on the heat, and just stay nearby while it cooks. Once it starts boiling, turn the heat to a simmer and let it go for 10-12 minutes.

Leaving the eggs in while it heats up gives them more time to collect they color as they warm up, and the eggs are less likely to crack.

Step 4: Take Off the Rubber Bands and Admire Your Work!

Once they've cooked, take them out and give them a quick douse with some cold water or just let them air cool. When you can handle them, take the rubber bands off! Some will lose their bands in the pot, and they'll just be pretty brown eggs, and that's ok too. The others will have neat patterns from folding, crossing, and twisting of the rubber bands!

And that's it! If you make them, post some pics!


Other thoughts:

You can vary your patterns by adding other materials such as herbs, parsely, plastic wrap, and similar things, and using the rubber bands to hold them to the eggs. This will vary the colors you get and give you other patterned prints and resists. Just try to keep your egg binding stable while it's soaking up the dye. This is also a variation of Eastern European egg-dying methods.

You can use the leftover hot onion water for dying other things - paper, cloth, yarn, wool, more eggs, lots of stuff! It's no vermillion or indigo, but a nice earthy tone.

If you want them for display, you can give them a shine with a wee bit of oil on a paper towel. Just a dab, and swirl it in.

If you're curious, that's Easter Cheoreg in the pictures with the eggs. Perhaps that'll be an instructable later!

Rubber Bands Challenge

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Rubber Bands Challenge