Marigold + Sappan wood

Thanks to the strike that my Union is on since yesterday, the egg-speriments are back on. There were some eggs last year that didn’t get documented, but they ended up directly on Facebook, so they still have a chance to be documented eventually.

Here are the first attempts this year, yellow is marigold, red is sappan wood. The large egg is goose, the small one is duck. Both patterns are messed up (altered after having been mistaken) traditional ones. It’s OK, the first few eggs of the season are allowed to not be up to par.

The final result below is not nearly as inspiring as the intermediate above, I blamed it on Marigold dye, which was acting rather strange and I ended up throwing it out after these two eggs. Or it could be because I was greedy of deep red and over-died the eggs. Or maybe there is some issue with the sappan wood dye, I have read up on that dye some more and might experiment with a different recipe. I just boiled wood chips for about 10 min and added alum. An alternate recipe suggest simmering for 1-3 hours and then cooling overnight or longer, and also adding some chalk since this dye supposedly likes hard water. Or maybe I rushed to take the dye off, and should have let the eggs sit and dry for longer. Or maybe I should just use chicken eggs (need to go to the store for that). Anyway, we’ll see what the future experiments show.

Now that I threw out the acting strangely marigold dye, I made yellow from the left-overs of weld extract instead, so you’ll probably see a few eggs with yellow made of weld, but not sure how many – weld stinks, unlike most other flower based dyes, and I have a bit of over-sensitivity to bad smells. I still have some buckthorn extract, which I never tried before, and which is supposed to give yellow also, so we’ll see what happens (I guess it also depends on how long the strike lasts).