I know, it’s a little late for a post about dyeing eggs being that Easter was two days ago but we’re busy and we didn’t have a lot of time to prepare ahead of time just so I could write about something for my website. Anyway, I don’t really recall how I stumbled across this article about dyeing eggs with onion skins but after seeing the final results on the page I decided we had to try it. Honestly, what better way to dye eggs but the all natural way and one which provides such absolutely gorgeous results?

On Saturday we spent the evening prepping for Sunday. This included boiling eggs for dyeing and potatoes for salad among other things. Instead of reading the directions for how to properly make the onion skin dyed eggs, I went ahead and boiled them outright as usual. While this works for more modern dyeing techniques, it does not work with the onion peels. So The Wife, being the wonderful woman she is, went back out to the store to get another dozen eggs for us to try again on Sunday.

While we were resting on Saturday night, The Wife took the time to thoroughly research the method and found many different techniques for proceeding and after watching this YouTube video on the subject she made the decision to follow the recipe linked above but use paper towels instead of pieces of cloth–a more modern approach and one which worked best for us.

Ingredients:

Eggs
Onion skins
Paper towels
Thread or string of some sort
Water

Directions:

Find onion skins at your supermarket or save them up yourself. We found that red and yellow onions work well and we both seemed to like the end result provided by the yellow onions the best. However, if you source your skins from the grocery store please note that if you try to provide a bag of empty onion skins to the checkout person they may toss them without notifying you (we had to go back a second time to get more because of this). We found that bigger single pieces soaked in warm water were the easiest and quickest to apply but feel free to experiment.

Wrap the eggs in the onion skins and wrap tightly and evenly with a paper towel and then use the thread or string to secure the paper towel to the egg. Repeat for each egg you plan to dye.

Place the eggs in a pot of cold water on the stove and cover. Heat to boiling. Once boiling, immediately remove the eggs from the heat source and leave covered for ~14 minutes. (12 to 16 minutes depending on the size of the egg).

After the time is up, remove the eggs from the hot water and cut away the string, paper towel and onion skins from the egg and plunge them into an ice bath.

Once they’re sufficiently cool, remove them from the ice bath, dry them well, and apply olive oil or vegetable oil with a cloth and buff them to a nice shine before enjoying your handiwork.

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Based on our experience with this method alongside what most people probably do which is use food coloring or the little tablets in the boxes at the grocery store just for dyeing eggs, I found this method to be no more difficult but produced a far superior product and one that I’d be proud to show off to guests. Anyone these days has pastel colored eggs for Easter but do they have cool marbleized ones from onion skins? Probably not.

How do you dye your eggs for Easter? Do you use traditional methods such as onion skins or do you just use the tried and true food coloring trick? Perhaps you prefer to hand paint your eggs or even use the little shrink wrap deals which put super fancy designs on there with little effort. Whatever you have to say about dyeing your eggs with or without onion skins go ahead and comment on!

See all the pictures related to dyeing Easter eggs with onion skins on Flickr here.