This year Ava and I coloured eggs for an
Easter egg hunt on Easter Sunday. Back home we always have an Easter egg hunt with chocolate Easter eggs. As chocolate Easter eggs are scarce around these parts we decided to go the American way and hunt for real eggs - dyed in unreal colours!
I think the last time I coloured eggs (successfully) was back in primary school so it's been a while. I gave it a try a few years back with standard food colouring but it just didn't work out. The colors came out very pastel and when combined with the brown shell colour they just weren't particularly effective. This year, however, I bought proper egg dye (
PAAS Easter Egg Color Kit) and super white American eggs. Now I'd always thought that the blindingly white eggs in America were the result of bleaching. It turns out however that they just come from a different variety of chicken than what we have at home and that's the natural colour - as unnatural as it looks!
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| Dip dying and drying |
We decided to work with hard boiled eggs for ease. I had originally planned to blow the eggs as I wasn't comfortable with wasting so much food however after the effort involved in blowing just one egg I decided that wasting a dozen eggs wasn't so bad! Blowing eggs turns out to be much harder than I recall from primary school. Kim made one egg explode while he tried to empty the contents into a bowl! I managed to empty one egg successfully but it took about 20 minutes and I ended up having to run water through most of the egg leaving the contents unusable for pretty much anything. Hard boiled eggs are much easier. Plus as I discovered later when dying them, they are much easier to colour than blown eggs which just float in the dye.
Our egg colouring kit came with pretty much everything we needed. Six little tablets of solid colour turned into six little bowls of vibrant dye when mixed with a few tablespoons of white vinegar. More pastel results can be achieved by replacing the vinegar with either water or lemon juice.
Once we had our dyes mixed up it was just a matter of selecting our colour combinations and dipping away. I was quite keen on recreating a few dip dye style eggs I'd seen on
Pinterest. Ava was keen on making everything as colorful as possible. We ended up going for lots of different styles - of varying levels of success!
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| Eggs drying |
My favourite eggs were made by dip dying. I'd dip one end of the egg in a colour, leave it to dry and then dip the other end in a contrasting colour. Sometimes I left a band of white in the middle, other times I let the colours over lap to create a new colour. I particularly like the eggs that we coloured with vertical stripes. These came out looking somewhat like a beach ball and are quite striking.
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| I like the dip dye effects on these eggs |
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| More dip dye eggs |
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| And some more dip dye eggs |
Ava enjoyed pouring the colour over the eggs. This created a tie-dye effect although the colours did tend to stick to the same places creating a lot of purply-brown.
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| Making rainbow eggs by pouring colour over the top |
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| More pouring of colour |
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The egg on the right was coloured by pouring dye over the top.
This left little white patches which look like shine spots making the egg appear shinier than all the others :) |
Covering an egg in glitter for a mirror ball effect was also a favourite of Ava's.
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| Sparkles! Add a little glue and sprinkle on some glitter for mirror ball eggs |
I think the results of our egg colouring speak for themselves. Beautiful, colourful eggs :)
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| Colourful eggs |
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| Colourful eggs |
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| A colourful dozen |
We had a great time colouring our eggs and I look forward to doing it again next Easter.
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