Are you dying Easter Eggs this weekend to get ready for Easter festivities this Sunday? If so, check out what we did this week.
Instead of buying an egg dying kit from the store, we used food to dye our eggs this year. It was fun for the kids to see how back in the day foods were not only used to eat, but as dyes as well. It was also a good way to teach them that we don’t always have to run to the store when we need to do something. We can be creative and figure out how to do it at home on our own.
So although this was a really fun project, there were some pros and cons.
Now, honestly… this probably won’t be something we do every year, but I loved doing it once. It was a great lesson for the kids. I even thought it would be fun to try to dye some clothes using berries this summer. I think they’d like seeing that.
Anyway, here are our photos and the foods we used!
- Beet root powder – red
- Blueberry – blue/purple
- Carrots – orange
- Cayenne/chili powder – rust
- Cocoa powder – brown
- Onion skins – orange/brown
- Red Cabbage – blue
- Spirulina – green
- Turmeric – yellow
We placed food in jars… just enough to fill about 1/4 of the jar. For foods like carrots we chopped them up into small pieces so they could cover the eggs better.
After our food was in the jars, I boiled some water in my tea kettle and poured it over the foods. For the powdered foods like spirulina, beet root powder, turmeric, etc. I stirred them in order to mix the powder into the water a bit.
Here they are after they’ve soaked for – yikes!! – 24 hours. This is why you can’t eat them… since they’ve set out so long. I suppose if you had room in your refrigerator, you could let them soak in there and still eat them afterwards, but beware… they may taste like the foods you soaked them in.
Next up, we put them back into the egg carton so they could dry. I periodically flipped them so they’d dry on all sides.
Below are the finished products! My favorites are the turmeric, onion skins, blueberry, red cabbage, and the speckled spirulina. The boys liked the dark colored ones, but they weren’t too impressed with the eggs that didn’t dye well. Maybe we should have experimented with more foods!
If you’re interested in giving this a try, here’s a great post to check out from Two Men and A Little Farm. She’s got a list of foods and the colors they make!