I hope it wasn’t irreverent to be sifting through ties at the Goodwill on Easter Eve at ten ’til closing. Because there was the lot of us, concerned, suddenly, that we hadn’t done a single Easter craft, holding up into each other’s faces splotchy ties, ties with paisleys, ties with zig-zags. Until we had two we could collectively shrug weren’t that bad.

It was then mentioned on the ride home that we had no eggs.Which turned into a stop at Fred Meyer. Which turned into buying more than eggs “since we’re here.” Which turned into rolling home after bed time with wired children and zero time for an egg craft anyway.

Which is how it happened that we remembered our ties on Thursday–four days after Easter–which, was just as well.

If you’ve done this before–dyed eggs with silk ties–then you know that you don’t need much in the way of tangibles. A couple of 100% silk ties, an old t-shirt, scissors, eggs, twist-ties, vinegar, and a pot of water. But add to that list a hefty dose of patience and perseverance and this could actually be fun. With children. Heh.

Alright. Here’s one of our sweet purchases.

What we’ve got to do first is take the tie apart. A pair of sharp scissors makes this easy.

If the tie’s got a piece of fabric on the inside, toss that. Or give it new life by handing it to someone who can recycle just about anything.

Double check that the tie is 100% silk. Then clip off that little tag, too. The dye for the eggs will come from the silk. Which means that if you’ve got something else that’s 100% silk–a blouse or underwear, ahem, those would work too.

Now we’ve got to wrap the UNCOOKED eggs in a piece of silk. Which is about as easy as tearing open a bandaid with one hand. Nothin’ hard about that. Until that’s you with the bandaid. And one hand.

The problem is that the egg is happy being mostly covered in silk. It’s getting the whole thing dressed and ready that requires a bit of perseverance and a few wrestling moves.

Here’s our first egg wrapped in silk and held with a twist-tie.

And here’s our second.

A thing to note is that the ‘good’ side of the tie–the most colorful side–is what we want to wrap the egg in. The darkest print should be against the egg.

The eggs get wrapped one more time. This could mean using old dish towels or sheets. We went with an old, white T-shirt.

And there it is. All ready.

Since we’re down one egg to a ‘woopsie,’ we’ve got eleven eggs all double-wrapped in our basket. We’re just going to carry those right into the kitchen.

To our pan of water, we’re adding 1/4 cup of white vinegar.

Then we’re adding our eggs and bringing the water to a boil.

When the water boils, we’re turning the burner down to low and letting the eggs simmer for 20 minutes.

Then it’s time to pull the eggs from the water and see what happened.

And the coolest thing? It’s usually nothing we expected.

Brown and pink? Um…okay.

Here’s our whole batch.

From the blue and gold tie, we got this design.

And from the dark-purple and blue, we got this. Wild.

So what do you do with a bunch of pretty eggs?

Well…

You set up shop in your living room.

And you sell them to your sister.

Easter eggs for sale.

Pretty Easter eggs.