This morning I woke up with a hankering for just a little something special to celebrate Easter, (more like spring time, for us. Although, look here….still snowing). We ran to the store so I could get some vinegar and I picked up a loaf of just baked french bread, too. We almost ate the whole thing instead of making bread pudding but I really do love bread pudding. I served it in my girly cups with whipped cream and it was super.

“Now, you can’t have any till I photograph it. Oh screw it, let’s eat!”
(Edited to add: the recipe for this pudding is in the comments on my flickr photo. I add a little heavy cream to top it off.)

After that Paul went to the studio and I stayed home dyeing eggs. I only dyed 7 since I’m really the only one who likes hard-boiled eggs. And actually, that left plenty of room for experimenting. I decided to use wine glasses to hold the dyes and they turned out to be the perfect size.  Here are the tablets dissolving in vinegar:

This year I wanted to try wrapping the eggs in lace, which I saw in Martha Stewart Living. On top of that, I wrapped them up tight in hosiery to hold the lace in place (seal the hosiery with a twist tie). I wasn’t sure it would work but figured I would try some other things while I was at it, too- so I also tried metallic mesh, rick rack and paper flowers. Here’s one of them about to go into the dye bath.

The added benefit of the hosiery is that you can run a skewer through it and then hang just part of the egg in the dye bath. As a girl I used to sit there with my wire egg dipper, ever so patiently. I once tried to make a plaid egg using all of the different dyes– I don’t recommend it.

Here’s the finished lace batch. I don’t quite understand why the lace works at resisting the dye but the pantyhose don’t affect it.  Easter magic, I say. I love the seeping in quality of it, too. On the red/yellow one, I first dyed the lace-wrapped egg in yellow, then moved it, hanging skewer style, into the red bath. The dye creeped up the hosiery and gave it a weird marbled effect, which I like.

And here are the eggs I made with the other materials. The paper flowers worked quite well- almost better than the stickers (which made the hearts). The heart egg was also wrapped in metallic mesh which gave it a cool faded grid effect. To get the yellow flowers on the blue egg, I dyed the whole egg in yellow first, let it dry, then added the flowers/hosiery combo and let it sit in the blue dye.

I also made one with rickrack at the far right of this photo (see me removing it here). You can see more pics of the process over at flickr. Hope you’re all having fun, wherever you are.