Decorate your Easter Eggs using Natural Dyes

The tradition of dying Easter Eggs throughout my childhood, and now with my own children, has evolved over the years. We have tried using food coloring, spent hours in elementary school painting them Ukrainian style, decorating them with stickers and more. We’ve bought the basic kits that provide you colored tablets to plunk into water, and even tried the new metallic effect sets that resemble the art of gold foiling.

All these other techniques aside, this year my children and I decided to try something different. We decided to access mother nature’s pantry to see if there were any natural fruits, veggies or spices that would color our Easter eggs.

We started by discussing which fruits and veggies had the deepest hues. My eldest immediately suggested blueberries, and luckily we had some in our freezer, so out they came. I next offered beets, and as we cut them up into pieces we marveled at the deep red hue that transferred immediately onto our fingers and onto the cutting board. Finally, we decided on spinach to see if it would turn our eggs green.

This was a trial and error period, as we found that the hard boiled eggs immediately took to the deep purple hue of the blueberries. The beets seemed to turn the egg a bit brown, so we transferred it into a boiling pot of water to try to extract some of the color that way, which seemed to make the water as red as blood, but didn’t really work to color the egg.

Finally, the spinach – well that was a bust. It did nothing. So we went into the spice cupboard and decided that the deep rusty-yellow of turmeric would be a perfect spice to try to dye our last egg.

The results were very cool, and my little ones can’t wait to see what kind of eggs the Easter Bunny is going to hide for them next weekend! 



Melissa Collins is a coffee-loving, lip gloss collecting mother of two little ladies. When she’s not cleaning up cheerios and blogging about the humour in parenting, you can find her curled up in her hammock with a good book. Check her out at www.mellysmommymanual.com