How to Organically Color Easter Eggs

By Amber Ortega on April 9th, 2009

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It can sometimes get difficult trying to keep harmful artificial dyes and colors from your children.  Boxes of Easter egg dyes are full of artificial dyes and colors.  To help protect you child(ren), try using some organic ways of coloring your eggs.

There are many different foods you can use to color the eggs, try these:

• Red or Pink: Fresh beets, raspberries, pomegranate juice, red onion skins, chopped rhubarb stalks, cranberries or cranberry juice
• Orange: Yellow onion skins
• Yellow: Orange or lemon peels, carrot tops, celery seed or ground cumin, ground turmeric
• Green: Spinach leaves
• Green-gold: Yellow delicious apple peels
• Blue: Canned blueberries or red cabbage leaves
• Beige to brown: Strong brewed coffee, tea
• Purple: Grape juice, violet blossoms plus two teaspoons of lemon juice, small quantity of red onion skins

In addition to whatever egg coloring food(s) you would like to try, you will also need:

• Hard-boiled Eggs*
• Small Bowl for each color
• Vinegar
• Water

*If you aren’t sure how to hard boil eggs, place eggs in a saucepan and cover with water.  Bring water to a boil and continue to boil for 10 minutes, then remove from heat.  Rinse eggs with cool water and allow to remain in cool water until they are cool to the touch.

1. In each bowl mix 1 cup of water with 1/2 teaspoon vinegar and the food needed to obtain the color wanted.
2. Drop hard-boiled egg in bowl and allow to sit until the color wanted is obtained.  The longer the egg is in the mixture, the darker the color will become.

If  you would like to add a little flare to your eggs, put stickers on eggs before placing the in dye.  When the egg dries and you remove the sticker, you will have that shape in white on your egg.  You can also put rubber bands around the egg to create stripes.