Easter, etc.

So I planned to make my daughter an Easter basket.
I was all pumped to do it.
And then my mother in law showed up.
(Don't worry, she really is a great mother in law!)
She had a basket.
It is handmade, split oak, and really nice. She guessed she got it in 1985.
There were a few toys, and a cute My First Easter outfit
(that she got before we even knew if it was going to be a boy or girl. She was prepared!)

Turns out, it's a good thing she gave her a basket.
As with all of our trips to Vermont, my mother and I have all sorts of intentions to do all sorts of things- such as making an Easter basket for my daughter- and we never get to everything.






We did, however, get to dying eggs!
I have a serious aversion to fake food coloring. (Especially when there's color in something that is, was, and obviously always should be brown- but that's for another day.)

For all of the colors, I boiled water with the ingredient and let it cool before I dipped the already hard boiled eggs. I used way too much water for the amounts of colorants, though.

It was pretty fun to play chemist.  I tried changing the color of the blueberries with baking soda.  It worked, but it wasn't pretty.  Don't try to mess with something good.

Blueberries for blue.
Spinach for green.
Turmeric for yellow.
Paprika for orange.
Red onion skins for red.

I heard that you should try to leave them in the liquid overnight.
I also heard you should use vinegar to get more vivid colors.

...Meanwhile, my husband did the "naked egg" project with his class a while back. You soak raw eggs in vinegar and the shell basically dissolves.

*Think, Catherine. Think.*

So we put some vinegar in some of the jars of dye and stuck them in the fridge overnight.
The eggs in jars with vinegar had bubbly looking shells in the morning, and the color wiped off with the top layer of shell.  Sigh.

Chemistry, you got me good this time!

At any rate, the colors were nice, but brighter would be better. I can live with that. At least I learned from this one!

When I got home, I decided that I just couldn't let go of the fact that I had tried making vanilla sugar from beans that had already been soaked in vodka to make vanilla extract, and the sugar, first of all, didn't taste very vanilla-y, and secondly, turned into a useless clump.
So I had to try to use these beans for something before they went to the compost.
Vanilla simple syrup!
I already had the ingredients right there. Just add water!

And ta-daa!

And then there's the last project I did.
Start some seeds!
I like to recycle, so I used old cardboard egg cartons (thank you, husband, for the idea!), cut up and labeled, and some of last years burpee pots.

Right now they are near a window, and over the heat vent. We just need to set up the grow light.




Up next:
Who knows...