Blog Posts

Naturally Dyed Easter Eggs

Do you eat your Easter eggs? Growing up, we always ate them but it never occurred to me that some people don’t till today.  As I was chopping away at all of our ingredients to make these Easter eggs, my husband made a comment about the amount of work to get natural eggs when we don’t eat them.  I was surprised because I always have and had planned to make an egg salad sandwich with these eggs in a day or so. If you don’t eat them, it may be worth your while to just buy the boxed dye because this isn’t super quick.  But it is also fun to see how natural ingredients can turn the eggs colors.
photo

We had great success with some and not with others.  If you’ve tried any, let me know what you’ve had success with.

Our greatest success: Turmeric. I’ll list the ingredients below in order of success. We had no success with the cabbage.

  • Add 2 tbsp turmeric to 1 cup of boiling water. Then add 2 tsp of white vinegar (YELLOW EGG)
  • 1 cup grape juice to 1 tablespoon of vinegar (SUPPOSED TO BE LAVENDER EGG. OURS TURNED OUT SORT OF GREEN)
  • Peels of 6 yellow onions. Add 2 cups of boiling water and let set for at least 15 minutes. Add 1 tbsp of vinegar (ORANGE EGG)
  • Peels of 6 red onions. Add 2 cups of boiling water and let set for at least 15 minutes. Add 1 tbsp of vinegar (SUPPOSED TO BE SORT OF GREEN EGG. OURS TURNED OUT BROWN)
  • Dice 1 medium beet and add to 4 cups boiling water. Add 2tbsp of vinegar and let cool completely before extracting the beets.  (PINK EGG)
  • Add 1/4 cup cabbage to 4 cups boiling water. Add 2 tbsp of vinegar. Let cool completely before extracting the cabbage (we added the vinegar after straining the cabbage. That may have been our error.  I re-added it to the cabbage and put the egg into the bowl with the cabbage and still didn’t get any color). (SUPPOSED TO BE BLUE EGG. OURS DID NOTHING).

Also, I was wondering why our pink eggs came out sort of speckled and found an article online that said if you leave the foods in the liquid, rather than straining them that you can get some fun effects like that.  When our pink wasn’t working really well, I added the eggs in with the liquid and the beets.  They colored up quickly that way and came out sort of speckled.

This definitely isn’t the way to dye eggs with toddlers either.  The time it took for the color to show up on the eggs is significantly longer than with standard dye methods.  My little toddler lost patience waiting and had a grand time sticking her fingers in the bowls playing with the eggs.  I would suppose leaving the eggs longer or using more condensed liquid (more food to water ratio) would help create more vibrant colors. I may put a few eggs into the liquid in the fridge and see what color changes I notice with increased time.

In order to make your eggs shiny, you can polish them with a little oil (vegetable, olive, or coconut).

  • IMG_7247

 

I thought I’d throw in this picture because I was really surprised.  The left is the cabbage strained juice prior to vinegar and the right is after adding the vinegar.  It’s the only one that changed colors when I added the vinegar but it was pretty crazy. Not really sure what I did wrong with the cabbage to get no color on our eggs.  Maybe next time.IMG_7244IMG_7251 IMG_7254

2 Comments

  • Jamie
    Reply

    This is so neat!! And can I just say that you are definitely super mom, doing all of this with a new born?!?! Can’t wait to try this out once Nathan is a bit older 🙂

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

ready to
clear the clutter?

When you fill in your email below, we’ll send it right over to you so that you can start clearing out the clutter and gain back your time!

    PS- We 100% respect your privacy. It’s not cool to sell people’s information. So rest assured, your info is safe with us. You can find out more about our privacy policy here.

    TIRED OF CONSTANTLY CLEANING?

    gain {free} Access to this Epic training series so that you can

    gain a cleaner home in less than 15 minutes a day

    so that you can spend more time doing the things you want to be doing