Eco-Eggs Egg Coloring
This year I decided to try a product called Eco-Eggs. I bought it from A Toy Garden, which is my favorite place to buy Waldorf and sustainably made, fair trade gifts and art supplies. Eco-Eggs is a egg dye kit made from natural pigments. The dyes are made using natural plant, fruit, and vegetable extracts from annatto seed, curcumin, purple sweet potato and red cabbage. This kit includes three natural dyes (orange, blue, and purple).
We simply followed the instructions. It was that easy.
Pour the dye powder into a half cup of water and mix thoroughly until it is all dissolved.
Gently add your eggs so they don’t crack on the bottom of your glass. This time we used all white eggs. But I’ve saved our dye baths and plan to try them on our brown eggs as well.
The kit comes with three colors of natural dye and this handy chart tells you how to get other colors, including how long to leave your eggs in the dye to achieve your desired result. Some colors are made by just dipping the egg in for a second and then removing it, as in the case of yellow. Others are achieved by leaving the egg in as long as 15 minutes.
My kids rarely have the patience to leave one egg in a dye bath for 15 minutes, as is recommended on some of the color formulas. But we’re really happy with our colors. Lucas enjoyed dipping eggs into two colors to make three-toned eggs. Asher really liked using his rainbow crayons on the eggs before dyeing them.
It always seems like 18 eggs is plenty to dye before we get started. But dyeing Easter eggs is so fun that it seems like we run out of eggs way too quickly. If you’re short on time this year, this Eco-Eggs product will work well for you, without using a lot of commercial chemicals in the process.
Aren’t they pretty? We get to hunt for these beauties tomorrow, as we’re celebrating Easter with one side of the family a week early. xo
