This eco-friendly craft can go from a simple twenty-minute project to a full-fledged artistic adventure lasting several hours.  The result is quite beautiful in either case.  My mother first made a batch of blown natural silhouette eggs with my sister and me when we were little.  She saw the article in Sunset Magazine two decades ago explaining how to silhouette leaves and ferns onto blown eggs using natural, homemade dyes. 

I envisioned myself with pots full of red cabbage bubbling and beautiful eggs emerging from the multicolored washes.  In fact, I flubbed this craft up quite a bit before I had success.  Hopefully you will learn from my un-Martha-like mistakes and have better luck.

Step 1:

The Easy Way: Boil the eggs.  If you choose this option, skip blowing the eggs and go right to step two.

The Advanced Way:  Blow the liquid out to make hollow eggs.  The disadvantage of this method is the time it takes, but the benefit is that blown eggs can be used year after year as an Easter centerpiece. I tried blowing the eggs myself but had little success and nearly passed out after my first attempt.  Eventually I found that using a bicycle pump with a needle attachment (like the kind you use for inflating soccer balls) works far better.  Make a small hole at the top and bottom, insert the needle attachment and blow out the egg liquid.

Step 2:  Find some attractive leaves, ferns and small flowers.  Ferns work especially well, as will smooth leaves that easily adhere to the egg surface.  I tried a few leaves and pine needles that were too textured.  These eggs ended up with no silhouette whatsoever since the dye was able to seep along the bumps of the leaf and cling to the eggshell.

Step 3: Rummage around for nylons.  It is neither cost effective nor eco-friendly to buy these new, so if you can, hunt up a used pair.  They will work better if they have a great deal of elasticity left in them.

Step 4: Place the leaf on the egg and cover with the nylon.  Be sure to tightly tie the nylon around the egg so that the plant stays close to the egg during the dyeing process.  My first attempts at dyeing were failures because I didn’t stretch the nylon as tight as it would go around the egg.  Because the leaf wasn’t secured to the eggshell, the silhouette didn’t ever appear.   

Step 5:

The Easy Way: Plop the nylon covered egg into a mug of water with food coloring and vinegar.  If you want to make your own dyes, see the hard way below.  But if your life is too busy for the extra hour or two of work, just use food coloring.  The longer you let the egg sit in the dye, the more dramatic the contrast.  Also, try not to check it too frequently since it will disturb the dye and could affect the quality of the silhouette. If it’s been at least fifteen minutes, remove the nylon and admire your creation! You’re done!

The Advanced Way: Cut up natural ingredients, dump them into a pot of water and create your own dye washes.  See my last post about using natural foods to create your own dyes.  I love the earthy shades that emerge with home-made dyes.  It’s best to boil down the natural ingredients until you have a few different colors of wash.  Then strain out the veggie scraps and cool the dye water. 

Add the blown eggs to the dye washes and toss in a good splash of vinegar. The hollow eggs will be difficult to submerge.  You’ll have to weigh them down by putting small lid inside the pan and placing a heavy object on top.  It will take quite a while for the dye to set so be ready to let them sit for up to an hour.  And you’re done! 

Overall, this craft is a good way to get your family outdoors exploring spring’s newest arrivals.  Take the easy route and simplify your life or try your ultra crafty skills on the advanced version of this project.  Chances are, you’ll do better than I did!  

My basement is a level of hell where all my failings as an environmentalist are revealed.  Up above this musty, dank repository of castaway boxes, Christmas decorations, charity donations, and mismatched pots and pans lies a perfectly ordered house.  In fact, the first thing most people do upon entering my humble abode is marvel at the sheer emptiness of it.  “Where’s your stuff?” they ask.  I just offer a smug smile in return, affecting an air of effortless minimalism. 

Where’s my stuff?  It’s in the basement.

Sorting through the contents of my basements was akin to doing an archeological dig, uncovering remnants of my wedding and my baby’s first year.  I’d thought a lot about the environmental impact of bringing a baby into the world.  I limited the baby gear that entered our home and bought much of what we did want at secondhand stores. 

But here’s something I hadn’t thought much about: people will buy you presents when you get married or have a baby.  Many, many presents.  They will encase these presents in bubble wrap and place them in huge cardboard boxes filled with Styrofoam.  You will unwrap these presents and bring them upstairs.  You will leave the boxes and packing material in the basement, where they will sit there for years, gathering dust and growing mildew.

I hate throwing packing materials away.  After all, it’s still perfectly usable.  The problem was, we’d collected way too much packing material to ever use ourselves.  Take the packing peanuts, for example.  We registered for dishes when we got married.  The company took great care to wrap every dish in bubble wrap and place the dishes in huge boxes filled with packing peanuts.  We ended up with eight garbage bags full of packing peanuts!  We should have taken them directly to a mailing center (most will accept clean packing peanuts, which they’ll reuse), but we just let them sit in our basement for a few years.  Some little rodent got into a few of the bags, soiling three bagsful of packing peanuts that we now have to throw away.

Portland has a handy recycling hotline (503-234-3000) with live operators standing by to tell Portlanders where to take almost anything that can’t be left curbside.  We called about our cardboard boxes of odd shapes and sizes, and they told us about a recycling center just a few miles from us.  This place also accepts bubble wrap, scrap metal, phone books, and all the normal recyclables such as glass and paper.  If your town doesn’t have a recycling hotline, you could still hunt around for a facility like this one before taking packing materials out with the trash. 

What about block Styrofoam?  I have a lovely collection of block Styrofoam in my basement.  I was happy to find that Portland has a facility that recycles block Styrofoam, turning it into plastic.

On a kind of recycling kick, we also got rid of old clothes and household items by calling a local charity that picks up your castoffs.  We dropped off new toys (gifts we’d never opened because we didn’t have space in our house) at a toy drive we saw advertised on television.  Last but not least, we loaded up a friend’s pick-up truck with branches and twigs from last summer’s pruning fest and sent them off to a yard debris place that will grind them into mulch.

Finally I can go down into my basement without the nagging feeling that I should be doing something about the piles of rubbish scattered all over the wet cement floor.  If I leave the lights off and avert my gaze, I can almost forget about the boxes of outgrown baby clothes and seldom-used camping gear I still need to sort through.  Maybe next weekend.

With daffodils just beginning to bloom, toddlers decked out in bunny costumes and thousands of families planning their egg-hiding strategies, Easter is a wonderful holiday full of hope and fun.  (Also, chocolate.)  Growing up, my family bypassed the bright, commercial idea of Easter by keeping it simple.  Now I realize that our basic Easter celebration was pretty green as well.  These tips were developed from my experience of a fun, but frugal holiday.

#1: Buy a used Easter basket for each child and then re-use it each year.  These are unbelievably cheap and plentiful at thrift stores and will bring up cherished memories as your child gets to find it anew each spring.  Let your child be part of the selection process and add decorative raffia or ribbon for extra flair.  In my family we never tired of hunting for our own personalized basket again and again.

#2: Skip or reuse the Easter grass. When did we all decide that the best way to celebrate this ancient Christian holiday was to line our baskets with Astroturf? I have to guiltily admit that the green plastic stuff was in our childhood Easter baskets too, but we kept the same grass in there for decades.  Our Easter grass is now quite vintage, but it’s still providing new memories.  If you’d like an alternative to plastic, put a piece of green paper into the shredder and Voila!  You have yourself some recyclable Easter grass.

#3 Use food coloring and vinegar to dye eggs.  Instead of shelling out the money for the dye kits each year and ending up with all that packaging, just fill mugs with warm water, add one tablespoon of vinegar and then pour in food coloring.  Dump the eggs in and watch the magic with your child. You can use color crayons to draw on the eggs before you immerse them and the designs will stand out after the dye sets. 

#4 Consider all natural egg dyes.  I think our family is going to experiment with this exciting tip from the tushbaby website.  If you add a bit of vinegar to the water while boiling your eggs and one of these natural ingredients, they’ll have a full range of hues.  The drawback is that you have to have a different pot of eggs boiling for each color you want to use, but you can always just pick a few and experiment.  The eggs need to boil and then simmer for a full fifteen minutes in the vinegar and natural dye mixture.

• Purple grade juice (for lavender)
• Red cabbage (for blue)
• Spinach (for green)
• Carrot tops, orange peels, or lemon peels (for yellow)
• Coffee or black walnut shells (for brown)
• Yellow onion skins (for orange)
• Beets or cranberries (for pink)
• Red onion skins (for red)

#5 Hide Real Boiled Eggs.  Rather than hiding candy in plastic eggs that you’ll find months later while pruning the begonias, hide real eggs this year.   Then you’ll have a healthy snack to share with your child that might distract him or her from the chocolate bunny. (We can hope, can’t we?)  We always enjoyed deviled eggs, egg salad sandwiches and some other creative egg dishes in the days following Easter.

What is your favorite tip for a greener Easter?  Send us your photos and stories and you just might make it into our next blog!

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children watch no television at all until after they turn two and urges parents to limit television after that.  We had no trouble sticking with these recommendations during the last few months.  With the writers on strike, there wasn’t much to watch, anyway.  I wonder if the AAP will rethink their position now that the writers are back and networks are showing so much concern for the environment.  Before the strike, youngsters could watch Leonardo di Caprio on Oprah praising adjustable thermostats and Ty on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition tearing down a perfectly good house and building an eco-friendly house in its place.  Surely all this media coverage will influence young minds everywhere, changing the world one Nielsen point at a time.

An Earth Day special sometime in the early 1990s was pivotal in my development as a young environmentalist.  Who knows why I found it so inspiring–one day I was living my selfish teenage existence, the next I was banning Styrofoam and collecting glass bottles for recycling (bottles that my dad, who unfortunately must not have watched that Earth Day special, threw in the trash because he didn’t want to drive around town looking for a recycling center).

At the beginning of the fall season, when I should have been out composting table scraps or harvesting rainwater, I was once again riveted to the television set during NBC’s “Green Week.”  That was months ago now, and I have to wonder if it’s begun to have the same effect on our collective eco-consciousness as that Earth Day special years ago. 

Important Environmental Lessons I Learned Watching NBC:

Recycle.  On Law and Order SVU, a mystery pizza was delivered to the precinct.  No one was hungry, so they were going to toss it, but then someone piped up with the unforgettable line, “Don’t forget to recycle the box!”  (Never mind that you can’t recycle greasy pizza boxes.)  Then the box blew up.  Hidden message: don’t recycle, because it’s dangerous.

Don’t Use Electricity.  The Biggest Loser made the grandest attempt to go green, weaving in other significant messages such as “Eating a Lot of Take-Out is Bad for the Planet” and “Drinking Lots of Soft Drinks Creates Piles of Waste.”  Contestants exercised without electricity (Bob let his contestants out into the mountains to hike, whereas Kim made her trainees work out in a dark gym).  As a reward for trudging up a ramp and dumping cans in a recycling bin, two contestants won what looked like Hummers, but were actually Hybrid SUVs.  On The Biggest Loser: Couples, which aired during the writers’ strike, the show is advertising their use of refillable water bottles rather than bottled water.

A bag of chips on The Biggest Loser

Use Solar Power.  On Life, Damien Lewis’s character had a dream about solar panels, proving that hearing about someone else’s dreams on T.V. is just as boring as hearing about someone else’s dreams in real life.

Drive a Fuel-Efficient Car.  E.R. tacked on a sub-plot involving a Smart car, which I surmised was their nod to Green Week.

30 Rock Particpates in Green Week

Don’t Open the Refrigerator (You’ll Kill a Penguin).  I learned this thanks to Green-zo, a beautifully realized character played by David Schwimmer on 30 Rock.

Now that the strike is over, we may be in for some more valuable lessons on ecology.  What better way to teach my toddler about environmental stewardship than to plop her in front of a T.V. set for hours on end?  I am sure somewhere, a gullible teenager is off collecting glass bottles for the recycling bin.  And with any luck, she’ll have curbside recycling.

Greenbabyguide.com was featured on Better Portland’s Surfin’ with Steph segment as a cyber pick just a few weeks ago.  How exciting!   The February 15^th show included bits on G-diapers, eco-friendly cleaning products, and greener baby shower gifts, along with a very positive review of greenbabyguide.com.

If you would like a small brush with fame, please consider being a part of our website.  We would love to incorporate photos of your child eating, enjoying nature, or doing anything else green (composting, gardenting, recycling, etc) into our blogs.  Please email the photo to us at greenbabyguide@gmail.com and include your child’s first name, if you want it posted as well.  

We are also looking for articles written by green moms and dads who are up to their elbows in the adventures of early parenting.  Check here for our submission guidelines and look here to see an example of an article we’ve published.  We’d love to get your quick tip or green idea sent to us at greenbabyguide@gmail.com.  Or just post a comment—we enjoy the dialogue with our faithful readers. 

The more wisdom we can get from a variety of readers, the more helpful our site will be to everyone.   You may notice that we’ve now upped our postings to four times a week, so keep checking back for more of our adventures in green living.  And please forward our site onto anyone who you think could benefit from our frugal green baby tips. 

I’ve always wanted to be one of those minimalist cooks who owns nothing more than a good knife and one skillet.  After years of acquiring every kitchen gadget and appliance under the sun (including, but not limited to, a crepe maker, stand mixer, hand mixer, waffle iron, and panini press), I finally had to admit that I’m actually a kitchen maximalist.  The upside of this is that I didn’t have to run out and buy anything for my baby-food making needs. 

Below you’ll find my review of every conceivable food-masher known to home cooks.  Needless to say, it makes the most sense to start with what you already own and purchase something only if what you have doesn’t work.  I’d also recommend buying something that you’ll use in the kitchen for years, even after baby’s palate has matured.

Blender–I found it funny when Joy wrote about using her blender to make baby food because this is the one gadget I never tried–it seemed like too much mess, and I didn’t want to add a lot of water to the food.  If this is what you have, though, it will work just fine.  Keep in mind that the blender is better at liquefying than mashing, which is why you’ll need to add water for best results.

Hand blender (immersion blender)–My aunt and cousin gave me a hand blender years ago.  At first I thought I would never use it.  What’s the point of a little hand blender if you already own a full-size blender?  At the time I didn’t have a full-size blender, but I was still skeptical.  But then, only moments after unwrapping my new gadget, we used it to chop up some chocolate in a big pot of milk.  This was necessary for reasons I have now forgotten.  I still use my hand blender to this day.

But I digress.  The hand blender is great for making baby food.  You don’t need to add a lot of water, and it’s much easier to clean than the regular blender.  Plus, it’s efficient for mashing small batches of food when you don’t want to drag out the heavy-duty appliances.

Food Processor–Due to my aforementioned desire to have a minimalist kitchen, I lived without a food processor for most of my life.  Now I can’t envision a future without it.  It turned out to be my number-one tool for food-mashing.  You can grind dry things as well as blend wet things, so I used it to mill oats that I then cooked into a porridge.  Audrey ate this porridge three times a day for months.  (Read about that here.)  You can also use a food processor to grind nuts into nut butters or chop up vegetables very finely without liquefying them.  The food processor works much better than a blender to make hummus, another baby staple (or so I’ve heard–my particular baby has not caught on to this infant culinary trend).

Food Mill–A food mill is another handy gadget for the baby food chef.  The advantage of this implement is that it will sort the stringy, seedy, or otherwise inedible parts of food from the soft, mushy parts.  So, for example, you could cook up some string beans and crank them through the food mill, and the strings and stems would be left behind.  Beyond the realm of baby food cookery, I’ve used the food mill to make gnocchi (a food processor would render the potato dough into a gluey mess) and coulis–the food mill saves hours pushing berries through a sieve with a spatula.

Mini Food Mill–I never had one of these, but Joy soon abandoned hers in favor of her blender.  These teeny-tiny food mills are sold in baby stores all over.  Supposedly you can take them everywhere you go and grind up your food at restaurants with it.  This doesn’t seem particularly practical, and once the baby is eating normal food the mini food mill would be out of commission.

Potato Ricer–Many mashed potato lovers swear by the potato ricer, which could also be used to mash starchy baby foods.  It wouldn’t work at all on green vegetables or fruits, I would imagine.

Potato Masher–So many foods can simply be mashed with a potato masher.  This is a nice, carbon-free way to pulverize your baby’s delicacies.  Of course, this is just conjecture as I do not own (nor will I ever own) a potato masher.

Pastry Cutter–A pastry cutter can double as a potato masher, in a pinch.  It’s also great for turning soft foods such as sweet potatoes or bananas into delectable purees.

Fork, knife, hands–Most home cooks own one or all of these items.  They can be invaluable for the baby-food maker in the family and have many household uses once baby yearns for more toothsome fare.

Other implements–I’m sure I’m missing a few obvious food-mashers.  A mortar and pestle?  A chinois?  An ulu?

Making all of my baby’s meals from scratch (and avoiding jarred and boxed baby food) has saved me hundreds of dollars.  I always knew exactly what went on my child’s plate and had a grand time experimenting with my arsenal of kitchen gadgets.  My daughter has since moved on to more sophisticated fare (such as apple slices and crackers), but I’ll always take pride in knowing that I created some truly delicious and wholesome recipes.  I’ll leave you with one of my favorites:

Mashed Banana

Ingredients: one banana

Directions: peel banana and place on a small plate.  Press the tines of the fork repeatedly into the banana until it is completely mashed.  Serve immediately.

When winter hit this year, the walls of our small house seemed to close in with the darkness and cold.  Listening to updates about lowering interest rates and the drop in housing prices, I was suddenly hit by a wave of cramped angst.  Should we consider searching for a larger house before our family grows beyond our square footage?  The thought of going to open houses with a precocious toddler in tow was enough to make me nauseous. (And no, I’m not pregnant.) Below, Roscoe contemplates a new home and the concept of snow.

So I started to evaluate why we were thinking about purchasing another home.  My first reaction was that our son needed more room.  Together my husband and I wrote a list of all the things we would love in a future house.  We imagined a living room and a family room for Roscoe to play in with an ultra-efficient gas fireplace.  I envisioned a kitchen full of windows and long countertops to undertake summer canning events and large homemade meals. A huge row of solar panels and a solar hot water heater would be the icing on our dream-house cake. 

Then it dawned on us–-only one of the items on our list really involved our son-and to be honest, he has no idea that we’re missing a family room.  All the other details on the list were our housing fantasies.  Was it possible that we were inadvertently giving into social pressure to “keep up with the Joneses” by moving up into another house?  After all, Roscoe seems to be perfectly content with our home.  He especially enjoys the bathtub. 

Coral Serene Anderson’s article “Towards the Ecology of the Home,” posted here on our site, helped put things into perspective. Her family of three happily contemplated moving into a home with just 400-some square feet. Hmm… All of a sudden our living space of around 1,000 square feet became rather luxurious. Then I looked into how house sizes have changed over the last fifty years, and was astonished (and validated) by the data.  According to the National Association of Home Builders, in 1950 the average new single-family home was just 953 square feet.  AND family sizes were larger than they are today!  By 1970 it had jumped to 1500 square feet and by 1990 it had made it just over 2,000 square feet. The NPR article on the exploding increase in home sizes has some excellent information.   Although we didn’t intentionally think about our carbon footprint when purchasing our small and affordable home, the limited square footage has also shrunken our annual emissions and kept our utility bills low.  We need less than half the energy to heat and light our home than the average 2349 square foot American house.  In the summer we’re shaded by a giant maple tree that provides all our air conditioning.   A small, enclosed entryway provides solar heat in the spring and fall and keeps the warm air inside during the winter. 

Because we opted for a small house, we can afford to live in an area that is within walking distance to shopping and parks–and my husband can bike to work for more than half of the year.  The cost savings in taxes, commuting, energy consumption, and house payments has provided us with the freedom to cut back on our work hours to spend valuable time with our baby. 

Our cozy home has kept our family quite comfortable-even with all the gear that a new baby brings to the picture.  In fact, our limited space is a great consideration when it comes to accumulating baby paraphernalia.  We don’t buy it unless we’re willing to trip over it. There’s no need for gates simply because Roscoe isn’t ever far enough away to get into too much trouble. (Well, most of the time!)

 So, have I become proud of my tiny house?  A little.  Also, I’ve learned that with some bundling we can easily get beyond these walls and spend time outside, with friends, or touring the supermarket on toddling legs. And while we’re here, I appreciate the fact that I’m never more than a few feet away from my favorite people.