Natural Dyes For Easer Eggs

We started with a batch of peeled, hard boiled eggs and used beetroot, red cabbage, red onion skins and blueberries. I bet you can’t guess which of these ingredients dyed the above eggs (I’ll tell you later).

Teddy helped me through the whole process. It’s a joy to me to see them as into a project as I am myself… especially an involved process like this with a bit of hard work and waiting.

We washed the ingredients, chopped them up and put each in a separate pot of boiling water, along with a couple of table spoons of vinegar. (Of course, I don’t need to tell you that if you are working with your child, make sure your work slowly and deliberately and avoid getting burned).

Beetroot:

I made sure that Teddy and I worked in old clothes so that we could both get totally involved in playing with the dyes without a care for spoiling our clothes. He rubbed his hands along the cool beet and was amazed that his hands remained red, even after washing them.

We popped our hard boiled, peeled, eggs into the red beet water. Would they go red?

It was great fun squishing the plump berries.

And wonderfully messy and sticky. We couldn’t resist an occasional lick of our berry juicy hands :-)

We sliced some red cabbage and noticed how wonderfully purple it was. We were certain it would make our eggs purple.

We put it into a pot of boiling water with our eggs and notice immediately how the water turned a lovely shade of blue.

Ha… perhaps our eggs would turn blue!

Red Onion:

We peeled our onions, using only the dried up top layer and the first juicy layer. In the pot with the water and eggs.

After a few minutes, we took the eggs out of our beetroot water – bright ORANGE!

We had expected them to be red and the anticipation to see what the other colors were, was palpable!

We took out the blueberry eggs – oh my… they had turned a gorgeous dark gray!

The red cabbage was next – bright BLUE!!

The onion a soft earty yellow!

Here they all are together – aren’t the colors pretty! Don’t they look edible!

Starting with the blue egg at 11 o’clock, here is what made each color – red cabbage, red onion skins, beetroot, red cabbage, blueberries, beetroot and blueberries. Not what we expected at all!

So, guess what we had for lunch… yes, colorful, all organic, dyed eggs!

All gone now! I’m a little nervous Teddy and Kitty will never eat boring old white eggs again :-)

Here is a link to our other Easter crafts.

Blessings and magic,
Donni