So, I thought I'd post this since every one's been asking. This year, I decided that we would find a natural method to dying our Easter eggs. I got the idea from another blog, Crunchy Domestic Goddess. We had so much fun experimenting with different foods to come up with colors. Here's a summary of what we did. You can visit the above blog for the full tutorial. Yes, it was a bit more pricey than the .99 cent Paas box, but it was a fun experiment for the kids. Plus, my husband and son like to call me a modern day hippie, so I thought I'd live up to the name. I really wanted to go with a more earthy color theme so I was very impressed with the results The above picture shows the ingredients and materials we used to make the dye. We used, purple cabbage, spinach leaves, frozen blueberries, frozen cherries, canned beets, coffee, tumeric powder, chili powder, vinegar and rubber bands and crayons for decorating. The crayons are the little colored pebbles in the pouch. There's also a red onion pictured, but we didn't end up using it. I wish we would have though because our red dye turned our eggs a dark bluish gray.
We used spinach leaves, blueberries and some tumeric powder to make green. This green turned out beautifully!! We didn't do too much measuring aside from the vinegar. We just kept throwing stuff in. It's important with the fruit especially to warm it and mash it up. When the berries burst, then all the color is released.
Next we used the purple cabbage and blueberries. This made an amazing dark blue!!!
This is the red dye....well..what was supposed to be red anyway. I used 2 cans of beets, (next time I'll try 3), frozen cherries, and not pictured above, some ocean spray cran-cherry juice. I think the juice is where we went wrong. Next time I'll use the red onion instead. These eggs still turned out a cool color though.
This is the yellow...obvioulsy...We used tumeric powder at first, then we decided to add chili powder to the mix and it mad a more vibrant yellow. Also, not pictured, we used coffee for the brown. I just brewed a REALLY strong pot of coffee and let the eggs sit overnight. I actually strained all of the dyes and set the eggs overnight in the liquids. This part is definitely crucial if you want the most vibrant color.
Our beautiful eggs!!!! We loved them so much. Milla especially likes to smell the brown ones because they smell like french vanilla coffee!!! LOL All in all we had fun. It was our first attempt. We learned a few things and we'll tweak some things next time. Thanks for looking at our masterpiece! LOL
