All Natural Egg Dye
Easter is only 2 weeks away! Doesn't it seem a bit early to be thinking about Easter already? I am not complaining though... an early Easter means that we get to wear white a little longer this year - can I get an amen!? I put together this tutorial fro dying eggs using natural dyes last year and wanted to revisit this post in case any of you want to try it this year. It was a really fun project and definitely worth giving it a shot!
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I know it seems a bit strange but my family has always been really into dying Easter eggs. {I know... crazy right?} When I was in school my parents used to throw these big egg dying parties at our house every Easter weekend. We would invite neighbors and friends over for the event. What started as a fun little get together eventually grew into an all-out craft competition where our friends would try to out-do their designs from the year before. Ever since those days I have always loved to dye eggs.
For a few years now I have been wanting to try using natural dye for my Easter eggs. My neighbors have done this with their girls several times and it's something that has been on my "to try" list for a while. This year I thought I'd give it a shot.
I decided to make 8 different colors from the following items: Red onion skins, yellow onion skins, beets, paprika, tumeric, blueberries, red cabbage and spinach. The process of making the dyes wasn't very hard but it was a little time consuming. I felt like I was conducting a science experiment in my kitchen. It would definitely be a fun activity to try with kids.
What you need:
2 C chopped red cabbage
2 C red onion skins {You only need the skin, not the onion itself. Look for loose skins at the bottom of the box when you are at the store}
2 C yellow onion skins
3 C chopped spinach
1 chopped beet
1 C blueberries
2 Tbsp paprika
2 Tbsp tumeric
white vinegar
What to do:
Place each item {individually} into a pot with 2 cups of water and 1 tsp of salt. Make sure to cover the pot so that you wont boil too much of the water off and loose some of your dye.
Boil for 10-12 minutes
Strain the water into jars or cups. Allow the dye to cool before handling it.
Add 1 Tbsp of white vinegar to each jar of dye
Of course you will need to boil a bunch of eggs too! Note: The onion skins absorbed a lot of the water when I was boiling them, and it didn't leave me with as much dye as I hoped for. You may want to plan on doing 2 batches of these if you want to get a lot of dye.
I absolutely LOVE the colors that the natural dye turned the eggs. The colors are much prettier and more organic {obviously} than the neon colors that the store bought kind makes. The downside, however, is that the natural dye takes much longer to color the eggs. To get bright, rich colors from the natural dye you will need to leave the eggs in the dye for several hours. I even left one batch of my eggs in the dye overnight. You can get really pretty pastel colors too - those only take about 10-15 minutes worth of the eggs sitting in the dye.
My favorite colors came from the blueberries, beets, red cabbage, yellow onion and the tumeric. The red onion worked really well, but I wasn't in love with the red-brown color that it made. The spinach and the paprika didn't work very well. I had to leave the eggs in those dyes for a very long time to get light colors. I was hoping to get a good green color out of the spinach so I will need to look into other options for that next time.
Aren't these pastel colors pretty too? I left these eggs in the dye for about 15 minutes to get these soft colors. I liked experimenting with leaving the eggs in the dye for different amounts of time. It was neat to get a range of colors from the same 8 dyes.
Staying true to my family tradition, I invited several of my friends over to have a little egg-dye party. Although we didn't bust out the googley eyes and hot glue guns it was a really fun time! I did buy some store brand dye to use along side the natural stuff for the party. We laughed and drank champagne and dyed about 60 eggs! I am going to have egg salad for days ya'll.