With Spring here and the Easter holiday on the horizon, many of you are opting to celebrate with the longstanding tradition of dyeing eggs. And a beautiful tradition it is! The eggs make great decorations as a centerpiece for your dining table or simply as a table arrangement to impress guests. Not to mention they are a FUN family activity.

The not-so-fun part of the traditional dyeing comes from the back of the egg dyeing kit: yellow 5, blue 1, blue 2, red 40 and so on, and so on. The dye is full of synthetic junk. Which, may not seem like a big deal to you, but if you intend on consuming the eggs after the holiday, you may want to rethink what you’re using to dye them. On the other hand, if you care about the environment and would like to vote mindfully with your dollars to support natural food products, you may also want to rethink what you’re using to dye them.

Here’s where we come in. We scoured the internet to find the best recipes for dyeing our eggs and came up with a few unique favorites to test out:

 

• turmeric
• purple cabbage
• blueberries
• spirulina
• hibiscus

 

As you will see, some of the colors came out much more vibrant than others. And we also discovered that the longer you soak them and keep them refrigerated when not on display, the more vibrant the colors will stay. We opted to de-complicate the recipes. We simply filled single cups about 1/2 way with each of the materials. Then added enough distilled vinegar to cover the material. Then followed up with hot water to activate the dyeing process. We submerged a single egg in each of the cups and let them sit refrigerated overnight.

 

Here’s what we ended up with!

Notice that we didn’t include what should have been a green egg that was dyed with the Spirulina. It didn’t work for us! Next time we will add some mashed spinach, perhaps?

Give this a try and let us know what materials worked best for you and which were your favorites!

Happy egg dyeing!