{craft fail} natural egg dyes

I try hard to be a green mama, but sometimes it ends up being more trouble than it's worth. I mentioned on Friday how we were planning to dye our Easter eggs using natural dyes. It was great in theory, and I was looking forward to seeing the effect of the different ingredients. I picked up a variety of veggies from Whole Foods, and even bought these cute little canning jars from Sur la Table. I followed the instructions on this site to make the following dyes:

• Yellow (tumeric)
• Blue (red cabbage)
• Pink (beets)
• Green (red cabbage and tumeric)

See, look how cute they are in their little jars. I felt like Super Eco Mom. I let them sit in their dyes overnight, and when I took them out in the morning...

Wah waaaaahhh. I'm grateful Emma's too young to remember her first Easter eggs, because no kid would get excited about these. They're the Easter equivalent of handing out raisins at Halloween. I've seen photos of other people's naturally dyed eggs, and they look great - so I have no idea why mine were such a bust. But they really really were. Looks like we'll be trying Kool-Aid to dye them next year!

PS... It wasn't actually a total bust. I used the leftover beets to make a puree for Emma which she liked but was a complete and utter mess, and the leftover cabbage to make a crazy delicious coleslaw. I used this recipe (minus the celery), and highly recommend it if you like vinegar based coleslaws (which are far superior to mayonnaise slaws, IMO.)

going natural

One of the easier to accomplish items on my Life List is to rock my natural hair color, and I've been pinning some inspiration in an attempt to motivate myself to take the plunge. First, let's take a journey back in time...

Here I am around age 2, with the blonde hair I've spent literally thousands of dollars over the years trying to pretend I still have...

And here I am a few years later, with the mousy brown hair I've spent literally thousands of dollars trying to hide... (and yes, I'm fully aware of the many awesome things going on in this picture)

And here I am this past Christmas, all dyed up...

So why the change? Well, despite being happy with the shade of blonde I've been getting the past couple of years, the upkeep is wearing on me. And I've been increasingly drawn to the natural-looking hair and makeup among the J Crew and Anthropologie models. And, honestly, I'm just curious what the heck my natural hair color actually looks like after all these years! Every girl who's been dying her hair for years has visions of shaving it all off and starting from scratch. (Or maybe that's just me.) And since there's no way that will ever happen, in order to do this I'll have to dye my hair what I think is my natural color and hope it grows out to match.

Here are a few of the inspiration pics I'm planning to take to my colorist. All three are essentially (what I think is) my natural color, with some warm dark gold highlights....

What do you think? Should I do it??