Easter Eggs have seriously never been so cool until now. I used to decorate these little guys as a kid and got bored with stickers and crayons and such. But then I discovered making my own natural dyes which gives each egg its own earthy randomness. The process is simple, chop or shred veg and fruit (the ones that usually bleed color) and add it to a pot – red cabbage, beets, spinach, carrots, onion skins, etc. Add a couple of tablespoons of vinegar and water to top off. Throw in the eggs and boil. Reduce heat to simmer for about 30 minutes, reducing the liquid dye. Sift with a fine mesh sieve into a jar and now you have dye which you can add up to 4 cups of water to if needed.
If you want less randomness and more uniform, solid colors, boil the eggs first by themselves then add to pre made dye. Here are some of the ingredients I used:
Aside from cooking the eggs with the ingredients, you can also make sure some of the sediment makes it into the jar which will help create more random looks. For example, the spinach didn’t yield great results on the boil. But putting the egg in the spinach dye overnight, got me a very cool earthy color and texture. The following are the results I got with the dyes. I’ll explain the process of each one under each image.
Beets – This is fairly uniform, although my bowl was shallow so one side got darker than the other. It would have been best just to dip the egg in a full jar.
Tumeric with a pinch of saffron – the egg cracked which gave it even more texture. This is one of my favorites!
Yellow Onion Skins – boiled in pot with skins. Love the textures
Spinach – soaked overnight in dye and sediment
Blueberry – yeah, kind of gray. Boiled in blueberries to give it the textures. If you soak it overnight, you’ll have more of a blueish gray.
Red Cabbage – This is my absolute favorite. You’d think it would be red or purple but red cabbage yields blue tones. Boiled with the cabbage it produces a trippy patterns.
