An Eggsperiment!

Do you dye your Easter eggs with your children?  Do you hate when the dye gets all over your table, the kids clothing, and stains your fingers?  Then think that if this coloring stains all of these things what are you taking in when you eat these eggs the next day?  You peel the shell off your beautiful red egg and the white of your hard-boiled egg is pink.  That can’t be natural and sure isn’t good for you.  Sure we’ve all done it, but maybe its time to stop and think just what are we eating.  I know it’s easy to go and buy that $1.99 kit.  I challenged myself to use food around my house or that I can find at the grocery store to dye my eggs.  If I can do this anyone can!  After it was all done my boys still had fun and there was no mess!  No franticness of cleaning up the dye the moment the egg splashed in the bowl.  My table isn’t going to stain this year!

I boiled my eggs like I normally do and let them cool before dying.  I did let them sit in their mixture overnight to let the color sit in.  I covered them in their bowls and kept them in the refrigerator.

First I walked around thinking what could I use to dye our Easter eggs....

I thought about the different colors and went up and down the grocery store aisles.

I thought blueberries, but fresh wouldn’t work because of their thick skins.  So what about cans? Well go figure they didn’t have any so I went to the juice aisle.  Did you know they make blueberry juice?  After dying my eggs, they came out a greyish blue color.

While in the juice aisle, I picked up grape juice too.  Those eggs came out a reddish brown! 

At home, I had boiled some water and put some in a bowl with 4 green tea bags.  Those eggs came out yellow!

Using the same boiling water and 4 ½ tablespoons of Cumin, the eggs turned an orange color.

I had a can of cranberries and crushed them in a bowl and added some boiling water to it.  The eggs became a purple color.

I broke up a few stalks of kale and put them in a pot of water.  I let the water boil and simmered the kale for a few minutes, and then I took out some of the water as well as some kale. This egg is a pale green yellow.

For the last egg, I used fruit punch and that egg turned out to be brown.

This is what my mixtures looked like before the eggs were put in!

  

  Boys getting ready to dye some eggs!

  

  Eggs getting ready to be chilled in the refrigerator over night.

 

 

It was fun to experiment with the colors and fun for the kids to.  My 3 year old loved trying to figure out what colors the eggs were going to be.  He also would just smell them.  So much better than vinegar!  You can experiment with different designs as well.  If you have rubber bands you can put them on and then submerge them in the mixtures.  Crayons work on them as well before and after.  What child doesn’t like to color and give them a reason to do it on some eggs!  Also we have tons of stickers here and I let my son decorate some of the eggs with them.

This experience was so much fun, less of a mess and best of all better for you.  You won’t be eating any extra food dye on top of your eggs.  I hope you have fun dyeing your eggs and don’t forget to make it an eggsperiment! 

Our finished product!

~Bonnie