Only 10 days away from Easter, decorating eggs is our tradition at home and church. There are many ways to decorate eggs. Here I share three common ways: using food coloring, natural foods and paints.

1. Use egg-dyeing kit/food coloring

The simple way is to use an egg-dyeing kit, or mix 1 tablespoon of food coloring with 1 cup of water. Drop the hard-boiled eggs carefully into colored water and let them soak for about 10 minutes. The longer the eggs soaked in the colored water, the darker the color will be. Take the eggs out and let them dry on paper towel.

2. Use natural foods

Here’s another alternative way to use natural foods to dye eggs if you don’t want food coloring. Here are some common natural foods you can use:

• Red: beets, crushed cranberries or raspberries

• Orange: yellow onion skins

• Yellow: ground turmeric, ground cumin, lemon peels or orange peels

• Green: spinach

• Blue: crushed blueberries

• Purple: purple onion skin, Welches grape juice

• Brown: brown onion skin, tea or coffee

Procedure:

1. Choose the “color-food” you like and combine with 1/2 tablespoon of vinegar with some cold water in a saucepan.
2. Carefully add raw eggs and bring to boil. Make sure there’s enough water to cover the eggs.
3. Reduce heat and simmer 10 to 15 minutes. The longer you simmer, the darker the color will be, but simmer at least 10 minutes so that the eggs cook thoroughly.

3. Use oily/water paints

Our Sunday school students decorated eggs with oily paints once before. I asked some students to draw any patterns they liked on the eggs. Some of them were asked to use a toothbrush to dip into colored water, then using a toothpick to flick different colored water on the eggs. The effect would be just like a spray and only a little colored water is necessary. My students enjoyed using this trick, and it saved us messing up all over the place.

Caution: Any decorated eggs with paints should not be eaten, unless you use food dye.

Updated: You can use a blown-out egg if you like painting.

Related posts:

How to Dye Easter Eggs With Onion Skins Step-by-step

Why We Dye Eggs at Easter

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 7th, 2006 at 10:26 pm and is filed under Crafts and Activities, Holidays, How-to Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.