Ostara Handcreme #14

“In Spring the young man’s fancy turns to what women have been thinking about all Winter.”
with apologies to Alfred, Lord Tennyson

We see the first glimpses of Spring at the start of February (in my part of the United Kingdom).  By the time the Spring (Or Vernal) Equinox arrives , Spring has definitely sprung.  This year, the Spring Equinox will fall in the early hours of Friday 20 March.  The days lengthen more rapidly at the Spring Equinox than at any other time of the year.  From the Spring Equinox until the Autumn Equinox we will have more hours of daylight than darkness.

This is ostensibly a post about a hand cream for the Spring Equinox.  The hand cream recipe is the same as the recipe for #14 Handcream and the blend of oils used to fragrance this version is Ostara.   So having fulfilled the promise of this post’s title, let’s follow the Easter Bunny down her rabbit-hole and decorate some eggs.

Down the rabbit hole

The last time I decorated eggs by dying them with onion skins was in Edinburgh in 1980.  I thought I’d better test out what I remembered of the process before posting anything about it, so last weekend I bought half a dozen eggs with light coloured shells, and gathered together some onion skins, some newspaper, some string, and some flower petals.  My collection of flowers included crocus, forsythia, primrose, periwinkle, hornbeam and celandine.

The idea is to stick the petals to the surface of an egg, then wrap the decorated egg with onion skin.

The onion skin-wrapped egg is then wrapped in newspaper to hold the petals and the onion skin in place, and tied into a bundle with string.  The bundles are put in a pan, brought to the boil, and boiled for just a little longer than it would normally take for hard-boiled eggs (maybe 5 minutes).  It can be helpful to weight down the bundles so they don’t float in the pan.

And that’s it.  When the wrapped eggs have cooled down enough to handle, you can unwrap the dyed eggs.  The overall effect is marbled, with the onion skin dye masked where the flower petals have been.

It’s still a little too early for me to find flowers in the garden that will colour the eggs rather than just mask the onion skin dye.  Colours rarely come true with this type of dyeing, but I do remember some of the coloured primulas add shades of red and pink to the overall effect.

Forty years ago:

I managed to find the photos I took the first time I dyed eggs in this way.  Here they are, from prints on Kadachrome paper and collected in an album: