German Easter Egg Decorations - A Photoshoot

Decorating hard-boiled eggs with children is a typical German Easter tradition. There are so many ways to decorate eggs and over the last few years we have been trying them out- From sticker patterns to hand painting to natural dying, the possibilities are well not quite endless but certainly vast. 

The only problem we have encountered along the way is what to do with all the eggs. Our children don't like eggs and there are only so many egg sandwiches and salads my husband and I can eat. Here in Gemany it is perfectly normal to give painted hard-boiled eggs as a gift at Easter, so that is one way to offload some of them. 

In the end I began collecting the egg shells left over from baking. Once the kids got the hang of handling them carefully, we had quite a lot of fun decorating them. So far this year I haven't involved the kids. I have been experimenting with techniques and colours, both of dye and of egg. Here are a few photos of the variations I got out of purple dye. I'll be posting the children's version in a few days.

A variety of shades of purple arranged in a jar

To make an eggshell vase, make a finger tip sized hole in an eggshell (here I used a white egg), empty out the raw egg and rinse the egg. Pat it dry and pop it into a jar of dye. To get the two-tone effect, only fill the jar to the height you want and stabilise the eggshell by inserting the handle of a fork into the hole. This keeps the egg standing and weighs it down in the dye too. Once the egg has obtained the desired colour, remove it from the jar, leave to dry and then fill with water and small flowers. To keep the egg standing you can sit it in an eggcup or stand it into sand, salt or soil for example. I used broken walnut shells simply because I hadn't dumped them on the compost heap after making walnut cake. 

To create this look, stick normal gold star stickers (the kind you might use for a reward chart) onto the eggshell then immerse the shell in the dye and leave until the desired colour has been obtained. We had three different brands of sticker around the house. Of those, two stuck. One type came off in the liquid. Here I used regular brown eggs and the dye took a little longer to take effect.

The inside of the eggshells takes on a different shade of colour to the outside. Arranged in a jar or with tealights in a shallow bowl, this creates a simple and elegant Easter decoration.