Monday, April 30, 2012

Very Short Power of Observation Quiz

This very short quiz tests your powers of observation  (brought to you by "the Littles").

Can you see it?

Too subtle?  Let's try it on The Blitz:

Maybe another angle:

Alright.  Give up?
Let's try one far less subtle:


Oops.  Bet you see it now.
Good thing she looks cute with her bangs combed to the side!

The culprit:

  Oh my.  Well guess our resident stylist will put those clippers away next time!  

PS -- I'm keenly aware I've not posted The Blitz's birthday or Easter or Softball or Confirmation.  I will get there!  Too busy putting out fires (and covering up hair-don'ts!).

Saturday, April 7, 2012

Natural Egg Dyes

Because of my bent toward kitchen experiments, our love of botanical and veggies, and my concern about food coloring in general, we went back to vegetable dyed eggs this year.  I used the information from a variety of sources but loved the marbled eggs I "pinned."  We used that technique and the one in a linked blog from the same source.  We will use even more of these ideas next year!

Here are the pics and the "how" is at the end!

This egg is wrapped with cilantro, cabbage, and onion skins - it's Hannah's and turned out so pretty


Here's our sweet friend Hannah

Sunshine and Tink - we also used berries
The boys.  Don't they look thrilled?

Pepper

Beets
Spinach - the Littles had a blast tearing it up
Cabbage - the kids tore this up too
Tumeric - gritty but pretty!
Waiting is fun at first

Then it got boring

Sunshine after ball practice


Aren't they lovely?

The middle one is tea -- it does have color!
It was messy and took about twice as long as the scary tablet way.  But it was more fun and we are so happy with the unusual look we will do it again next year with a few changes.

In the end, we went with the following recipe, garnered from several places on the web:

2 to 3 cups vegetable matter (see the end)
2 cups water
1 teaspoon alum
2 tablespoons white vinegar (added at the end so it doesn't cook off)

Cook the first three together a long time, 14 to 30 minutes.  When done, strain and add the vinegar.

Beets:  for a light redish pink --they really don't get very dark.  Next time I will try cooking them 45 minutes or pressure cooking them.

Cabbage:  Use red cabbage for blue; it's lovely.

Onion skins: we have used them in the past but only used them as decoration today (I'm allergic)

Spinach:  Never again. It did not work and we cooked it forever.

Tumeric powder:  2 tsps to 2 cups water.  Such a pretty yellow.

Strong tea:  2 tea bags to 1 cup water will yield eggs about the color of brown eggs.  But we like it!