Easter Eggs

Ever since I was a teenager, I've wanted to dye Easter eggs with natural dyes, with foods and such from the pantry. This was finally the year. Although I faced opposition from some children, they eventually got on board when I assured them that it was only for this year, that it would be a fun experiment. I also showed them tons of cool pictures on Pinterest. 

These are the results.

I was quite pleased with the results. I'm not sure I'd get the exact results again because I used a few different methods and didn't measure the time or the ingredients. 

I used, starting at yellow and going clockwise, turmeric (yellow), coffee (brown), onion skins (rust), beets (tan on the outside, light pink on the inside), purplish gray (blueberries), and purple cabbage (oh-so-pretty blue!). 

The epic fail was green; I used spinach, green tea, and nettle which produced an almost totally white egg. My son, who was in charge of the green, made the executive decision to dump a good bit of green liquid food dye in because he wanted green. I agreed because there was just nothing appealing about that non-green egg.

The other experiment of the year was trying to get the imprint of flowers on the eggs by using pantyhose/tights and rubber bands to hold a flower down while in the dye bath. The results were mediocre (at best), but we think the little girls' tights were too tightly woven. However, the neat egg effect you can see below was produced where the tights were twisted and rubber-banded on the opposite side of the egg from the flower. It was a fun discovery in our little experiment.

If I were to do this again, what would I do differently? Well, I am wondering if the eggs in the beet dye were in the bath too long because they were light pink for a while. Same goes for the blueberry one; however, it was a deep, dark purple when it originally came out of the bath and changed later. I would completely avoid attempting green.

Which were my favorites? That's easy. I loved the colors that resulted from the purple cabbage, the onion skins, the turmeric, and the coffee.

Have you ever experimented with Easter egg dyes?