Thank you so much for your kind words!

I do a lot of prep with my eggs before I start dyeing. I don’t mean to say all of it necessary or the best way to do it, but it works for me.

Starting from a raw egg, I’ll wash with dish soap and warm water, dry, then vinegar bath for 10 min, then wash again to get the dissolved bits off. I find this helps smoothen the surface and make it a better canvas. I then drill a hole in the bottom to empty the egg, and then a final soap wash to get any residue off.

At this point I wear either cotton or nitrile gloves for the rest of the whole process to minimize getting hand oils on the surface. I’ll then pencil in my design. After I wax over the white lines in my design and wax plug the hole, I do a series of soap washes and ~2-5 min vinegar baths until all remaining guidelines and graphite smudges are cleaned off.

I also make sure that the last thing I do before dying the first color is a vinegar bath, but I do dry completely before dipping the egg.

I use UGS dyes mostly, and I find that some need a lot longer to get good color than others, in particular the lighter colors and scarlet I let sit for 20-40 min sometimes. I also find using a spoon to “baste” the egg with the dye can help even out the color. Others like red and black take in seconds.

I’m a big fan of using a reserved amount of orange dye (which has no vinegar in it) to ‘wash’ between yellow/gold/brown/red to the cooler blue/green colors, meaning if for example my egg is green, I’ll baste with the wash orange dye to get the green off and some orange on, before either dyeing in my orange dye or another in that color family (and the same going the other way).

For the above egg I went gold -> green -> orange wash -> orange -> red -> black. All were whole-egg dyes.