Traditional Coloring and Dyeing of Easter Eggs

The coloring, decorating, and dyeing of eggs is a beautiful and fun Easter tradition that the entire family can enjoy. Before William Townley invented PAAS Easter Egg Dye tablets in 1893, the following old methods would have been used.

Decorating Easter Eggs

From Receipts and Remedies, Louis A. Fleming, 1908.

An old and simple way to color eggs for Easter is to boil them in a kettle with a lot of the outer peel of red onions.

Easter eggs can be colored many different shades with analine dyes. The dye should be diluted to the proper shade and the eggs boiled in it. Green, the color of hope and resurrection, is particularly appropriate.

Eggs can be boiled hard and painted in water colors with a flower or a butterfly as symbolic of the resurrection.

Another way to prepare eggs is to coat them with metallic paint and frost them with diamond dust; or to cover them with gilt, silver or colored paper.

A simple way by which children may prepare Easter eggs is by tying up each egg separately in a piece of bright colored silk or cotton, having previously pasted some little design on the surface of the egg. Have the eggs boiled slowly for half an hour and then set aside to cool. When quite cold untie the covering and the eggs will be found nicely colored and with a clear impression of the design. These eggs may be placed in egg cups which have been lined with fringed tissue paper, and placed upon the breakfast-table on Easter morning.

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