Tie-Dyed Eggs: Easter {Eggs}travaganza -

Easter will be here before we know it. I have so many childhood memories of going to my nanaw and papaw’s for Easter Sunday dinner after church. Nanaw always had an Easter basket, sitting on the hearth, for me and my sisters, and cousins along with a couple of new summer outfits for each of us. After a big, delicious meal my sisters, cousins, and I would go out and hunt for Easter eggs that someone had carefully hidden. We continued that tradition when my parents became grandparents and I plan to do the same.

I decided to make my first Easter post about dyeing Easter eggs. Megan (my personal photographer) came over – oh, what fun we had. We used to make all kinds of dyed eggs when she and her brother were little. Tie dyed was one of our favorites. Oh, who am I kidding they were all our favorites.

If you have little ones, you can pull a chair up to the sink and hopefully all of the mess will stay right there – in the sink. This is a great dying method for younger children.

This time while doing eggs we discovered a different technique that worked so much better than our usual tie dye method. The old way often resulted in the colors blending so much, they often turned out to be some funky color that I’ve yet to see on any color wheel. All I could think was that there had to be a better way to get all of the colors we wanted. That’s when it hit me!

We used gel food coloring instead of the liquid. It worked so well we will never go back to the old way (which really wasn’t so different).

You will need to hard boiled white eggs, gel food coloring and white vinegar. To get started put several hard boiled eggs in a colander and splash with the vinegar.

Next take your color choice in the gel and squirt a squiggly line onto each egg.

Swirl the eggs around in the colander letting them rub against each other and the colander to spread the color around. Be sure not to completely cover the eggs in color. Let the color set for 30 seconds. Next, using the spray nozzle on your sink, rinse the excess color from your eggs and colander. (I can’t believe we didn’t think to get a picture of these two steps) and re-splash with vinegar.

Repeat those same exact steps with a different color. We chose red. Don’t forget to rinse the colander and re-splash with vinegar between every color – very important. It keeps your eggs from turning into some funky color like I’ve mentioned before.

Just look at that marbling effect. Continue this with up to three colors per batch. We used a combination of yellow, red and blue. And a combination of yellow, blue, green. Out of using just those color combinations, we ended up with beautiful shades of purple, orange, and pink.