Coloring Easter eggs naturally - Latvian style

By now, many Latvians have saved up a bunch of onion skin, and you wonder - why? Well, we do it the natural way. Since I've been little, my family, friends, fellow Latvians have followed this tradition - to color eggs in onion skin. It gives the eggs a beautiful mix of reddish and brown coloring. This is the only tradition I've kept with myself for years and still keep doing it. It's simple, fun and creative. Yet, this is only one of the many methods. As you might have guessed, not only onion skin can give you natural coloring, but you can use a variety of other natural products, such as turmeric for a lovely yellow tone, blueberries for a sky blue or beets for sweet pink.

There are no limits

Rice, pasta, leaves, paper, thread and... - there are no limits. Whatever you have at home, be creative and try to use as many different patterns for your eggs as possible. The "musts" I always have:

• White eggs (We use brown eggs in Latvia, however in Denmark, I can find only white);

• Stockings (I know you just raised your eyebrows), I use stockings to wrap the egg and keep all the rice, pasta, etc. inside. You can also use a cheesecloth.

• Thread - to tie up those nice stockings;

• Onion skin - quite a lot. I believe I saved up the skin from 3kg of onions.

A tip: It should also be noted that before boiling the eggs, make sure you kept them outside in the room temperature or in a warm water. Why? For the eggs to avoid the sudden shock. Placing cold eggs right away in warm or hot water will create cracks, and I'm sure you want to avoid that. Therefore, the best way to prepare is to leave the eggs outside for a while, meanwhile boil the water with the onion skin for 30 minutes on medium heat and add some salt, which will create the peeling much easier. Set it aside, in this way the color will become even darker and better for later use.

Be creative and use whatever you have at home

Only surprises

While the pot with the onion skin is resting and your eggs are not as cold anymore, it's time to be creative! While you struggle to figure out how to make each egg look different by adding more rice, covering the egg with leaf, cutting out heart shapes...it will not look exactly the way you planned. The best part about this - in the end you will never know how the egg will turn out. While sharing this tradition with my boyfriend, he made two eggs by himself. Very proud! So I made the rest of 13 myself...Yeah, it took forever. But the excitement of unwrapping the eggs later on - kept me movin'!

Wrap the eggs in rice, pasta, anything really!

Be patient!

For someone like me who has done this every year - this is nothing. I can spend endless hours preparing the materials, wrapping eggs into stockings, while most of the rice falls over the floor. It's something fun, creative and at the same time relaxing. What I usually do is, I wrap 4 eggs into stockings and place them in the onion skin pot. I start to boil the water, I set the timer around 12 minutes only after the water has started to boil. While the eggs are boiling, I continue to wrap the remaining ones.

I always use onion skin that I've saved over the time for Easter

The magic

After I've boiled all the eggs, I place them in cold water. This is a must, in order to ease the peeling and keep the color. When the eggs have cooled down, unwrapping them from cloth, it surprises you with unique pattern. There is no egg that is the same.

Happy Easter!

Check out this video with all the process!