The OE's grandfather was a Welsummer, the other 3/4 is Cream Legbar. Her mother looks exactly like my other Legbar hens.
Egg color varies some in both breeds. My Ams tended to more turquoise and got bluer as the season went on. The Cream Legbars start bluer and faded a bit over the season, probably because they lay more eggs overall. The Black Sexlinks are very blue in tone (no hint of green) but start out lighter than the others and fade faster, because they seem to lay 6+ eggs per week and just run out of blue color. After a few months, they look white unless you put them next to a white egg or in a white carton.
The secret to great egg color in any breed seems to be to reduce the number of eggs they lay to concentrate the pigments in the shells of the few they lay. This is certainly the secret to dark brown eggs. My Welbars and Welsummers that have been laying for months are laying eggs colored like a hatchery Welsummer now. Darker than a Rock, and lots of spots, but nothing that you would call chocolate or even terra cotta. Production is way down too, I think most are starting to molt. I'm going to start increasing the daylight hours with artificial light around the middle of Dec. Hopefully, they start to lay about a month later. I'm fine with poor egg production from now until January/February.
