My sister-in-law found a blog post from Blisstree about naturally dying eggs, and we tried some of the tips out. The whole experience was quite interesting!
We mainly tried the Red Cabbage for blue, tea for red, and the turmeric powder for yellow. This is what happened:
The red cabbage test was the most interesting!!! Blue from red cabbage? But boiling red cabbage really does turn the water a deep blue color. Then we noticed something quite startling (and promptly experimented a little because it was too cool of a discovery not too), when you add vinegar the blue water turns purple! So we did two over night tests: leaving eggs in blue water without vinegar, and leaving eggs in the purple water with vinegar.
The different shades of purple come from the length of time the red cabbage boiled and steeped in the water. The deeper the hue, the longer it steeped.
For the deep red water we used Red Zinger tea from Celestial Blend. Red Zinger tea with honey is so good! (This last bit has nothing to do with dying eggs; I just thought it was a good idea to mention the fact.)
We attempted green by boiling spinach and beet leaves, but the water was a yucky yellow color, so we never actually put the eggs in to see if it worked. I now wonder what would have happened.
The results after letting the eggs sit overnight! This was really fascinating. The beautiful blue egg came from the purple "red cabbage" water with vinegar. The second egg, that is still quite white, came out of the blue "red cabbage" water with no vinegar. The third egg, a beautiful yellow, was from the turmeric, and this egg really didn't need to sit all night, because, unlike the other eggs, the yellow color started working immediately. And the brown speckled egg came from the tea.
Overall I'm still overly fascinated by what I learned about red cabbage.
For kids, because the other eggs have to sit in the color water dye for so long, this wouldn't be terribly fun as an activity, but maybe there are other natural color dyes out there that work faster. But who doesn't like a little science!?
For more information and tips you can check out the Bliss Tree blog post "Health Hack: Natural, DIY Easter Egg Dyes."
I did put one egg in the beet green water, and it just turned a weird brown. I've heard of natural food coloring, but I think they're a bit expensive. Maybe we'll try those next year.
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