Vegetable-Dyed Easter Eggs

This is part of a collaboration with my friend Melissa’s blog, The Chocolate Muffin Tree. Scroll to the bottom for a link to her Naturally Dyed Marbled Egg tutorial. I’ve never seen anything like these before, and and you’ll want to make these with kids, I promise!

I’m trying to make a move away from synthetic food dyes and wanted to use natural, homemade dyes this year. Not only are these colors absolutely healthy for human consumption, but the process of making them is a wonderful lesson in creating art materials from scratch and thinking critically about  how to achieve various colors naturally. As I was cutting the onions and beets I asked N what colors she thought they’d make. I also asked questions like, “If I wanted to make blue dye, what might I make it with?” She had fun making guesses based on what we had in our kitchen and garden, and also came up with her own suggestions such as, “let’s take the skins off the bananas to make yellow dye!”

What we used

• Hard boiled eggs
• Skin from one onion, two beets, large handful of spinach, half head of cabbage
• Vinegar
• Water
• Bowls
• Ice cream scooper
• Rubber Bands
• Stickers
• Crayons
• Parsley Sprigs
• Cheesecloth

We started with onion skin in pot #1. Beets in pot #2. Spinach in pot #3. Chopped cabbage in pot #4. We added water (about 3 cups) and 2 tablespoons of vinegar per pot. The vinegar helps the dye set onto the egg.

We cooked them for 30 minutes each and then strained the colored water into some bowls.

While the dye was cooling, we wrapped a some eggs with rubber bands. Fine motor skill training!

We covered eggs with stickers.

And we drew on eggs with crayons.

Our ice cream scooper made for a good egg scooper.  Do you see that barely green water up there? That’s what transpired from cooking our spinach. Pale green water. As you can imagine, it didn’t do much to our eggs. Next time I think we’ll try using more spinach. Has anyone had success achieving a vibrant green color?

We unwrapped the eggs to reveal the hidden images!  This pale yellow color was made by the onion skins.

Dye seeped into the openings of the bunny sticker, revealing a blotchy silhouette that’s still quite nice. A bunch of these all over an egg would be kind of cool.

But small stickers like this little butterfly left a clear impression. Lovely.

Brilliant blue came from the red cabbage! To make this egg we wrapped cheesecloth around parsley sprigs. If you have pantyhose, that would work even better.

I found a new life for a stack of hole-punch reinforcement stickers! Don’t you love this? The grey color came from the beets (sad, because I was hoping for pink, but still beautiful), the egg in the back is a brown egg dipped in red cabbage dye, and the yellow egg is colored by onion skin.

Before tossing the cabbage leaves out, I wrapped them around an egg and popped it in the fridge overnight. Tie-dye egg!

For more natural egg dying ideas, visit Melissa at The Chocolate Muffin Tree.

Have you colored eggs with natural dye?

If you have, please share a tip, link, or photo!!