duck

Last year’s eggs

| msvarnyk

Here are some eggs that I made last year but didn’t get to post on the blog. As usual, natural dye experiments.

Smaller egg – duck, yellow-marigold, brown – dried elderberry (not particularly reliable, seems like). Bigger egg – goose, yellow– marigold, orange – madder, brown – dried elderberry.

Yellow – weld, olive green – malva, blue – cabbage, pink – old madder+cochineal after vinegar. Smallest egg is chicken, then duck, the goose.17546764_10155099642727660_3361046898600688573_o

Weld (yellow), cabbage (blue, green, teal), duck eggs.17349598_10155028475437660_8850810793684496621_o

Weld (yellow), cabbage (green/olive), and madder/cochineal (orange), duck eggs17239776_10155028478162660_7696951738701663448_o.jpg

Marigold + Sappan wood

| msvarnyk

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).

Last eggs of the summer

| msvarnyk

I had a thick pen and some dyes left over from making big eggs (which I will show you later), so I made a few simple eggs. I love using the thick pen even on small eggs.

The dyes did not cooperate so well, especially the red one, not sure why, they might have not liked going in and out of the fridge. The eggs also did not provide a very even coloring surface. Maybe because I wiped some pencil lines with vinegar? To be further explored.

Yellow is coreopsis as usual and red (or rather orange) is madder with cochineal. Duck eggs.

Coreopsis and madder

| msvarnyk

Some more experiments with same dyes, except this madder is from roots, not from powdered extract. In the first egg I overdid it with madder (because I have both light and dark red from the same dye), and it ate though the wax and messed with the yellow of coreopsis. Duck eggs.