our easter eggs: dyeing eggs with natural/food dyes

i wanted to dye eggs with the kids. i only had a little bit of food coloring, so i kept putting it off and then last week a friend of mine posted this link on her fb wall.

http://networkedblogs.com/p30600218

the blog is about using things you already had in you kitchen to dye your eggs. it looked like fun. i was determined to only use things that i had already. onion skins, coffee grounds, carrot skins spices etc., but then i was at the grocery store and i got a little excited about the different colors i could get. so i did buy a small head of red cabbage and some beets. and i'm really glad i got the beets. i only used one for the dye, but as soon as i smelled them i remember how much i like them!

the kids colored with crayons on some of the eggs before we dyed them. i marked them so they would know whose was whose

i showed the kids all the different things we were going to use and had them each guess what color they thought it would make the eggs. jeff got in on the guessing as well. i made the dye and the kids picked which colors they wanted to use and we set them in the refrigerator to soak overnight.

we used red cabbage, blueberries, tumeric, coffee, beets and onion skins

we got them out this morning and the kids flipped out about the colors. they got a couple of them right but the one nobody guessed was the red cabbage. who knew it would turn the eggs blue?!

the finished product! awesome, huh?!

i love the colors!

the 3 across the top soaked in the coffee. the 4 yellow soaked in the tumeric. the one orange soaked in the onion skins. the 3 purple soaked in the blueberry. the 2 dark pink soaked in the beets. and the 4 blue soaked in the red cabbage.

the kids love them and it was fun seeing their surprise at the colors they turned out to be. i did try to be a little creative with mine by wrapping some rubber bands around them in a fun design. you can kind of see it on the coffee one. that was just one wide rubber band. the other 2 i tried didn't turn out because i took the rubber bands off while the dye was still wet. so, if you want to try that, wait until the eggs are dry before taking the rubber bands off.

the kids each had an egg for snack this morning. biglittle was really unhappy to discover that when he peeled his egg, it was a real egg and not candy. lol!