A couple of years ago, Tatum and I decided to try colouring our Easter eggs with natural ingredients rather than the kits that you can buy at the store. It was fun to experiment with different fruits, vegetables and spices to see what colours we could get. This year, we tried again and with a few different things. I love the soft, natural colours that we get from using items found in our kitchen. Because we experimented a little bit, some eggs turned out better than others. But we still had fun trying different ingredients and seeing what worked and what didn’t.
I got the inspiration from Dr. Momma’s website. The original post to using natural dyes for easter eggs can be found here. Here’s what we did:
We were attempting to make orange, yellow, blue, pink and green. We had carrots for orange, turmeric and cumin for yellow, beets for pink, grape juice for blue, and spinach for green.
We simmered the concoctions on the stove. I used about a cup or two of water to just cover the item I was boiling. As dr. momma’s post states, you want the water to be about four times darker than the colour you desire. For the spinach, we got creative and pureed it in the processor, then added it to the water to boil. We thought we might get a richer green colour rather than just boiling the leaves. We cut the carrots and beets up and boiled them that way. For the turmeric we just added a bunch to the water and let that boil. We also boiled the grape juice for a bit.
Tatum adding the turmeric to the water!
I got a bunch of bowls ready to add the different dye mixtures to. As the peaceful parenting post stated, I added three tablespoons of vinegar per one cup of dyed water. We ran the dyed water through a fine mesh strainer first to get rid of some of the grainy-ness.
We let the eggs sit in the mixtures for a few hours to really soak in the dyed water. Starting from the top left it is turmeric, beets, grape juice, spinach, and carrots.
Here are our results! The turmeric produced an amazingly beautiful yellow. I was really happy with that. We heated the grape juice, and I don’t know if that resulted in the weird speckled look that we got on those eggs (we think it might be from the sugars in the juice), but I suppose they look kind of like some sort of wild bird egg! When we used natural dyes for the first time, we used purple cabbage and that resulted in a really nice blue. So I recommend using the cabbage over the grape juice. Our eggs we soaked in the beet water came out a very ruddy colour, so it may have been that we didn’t soak them long enough/make the dye strong enough. Carrots produced more of a brown colour rather than the orange I was hoping for.
All in all it was a really fun activity and we enjoyed experimenting together in the kitchen. For the full list of fruits, veggies and spices you can use (we didn’t try them all, so get creative and try some different ones! They may produce better colours than what we got), take a look at the Natural Easter Egg Dye post from peaceful parenting. If you try this with your kids and come up with some cool colours, feel free to share them on our Facebook wall!
{Franki}
