April 26, 2019March 24, 2024 Theadventurousallens

Six Fun Different Ways to Dye Easter Eggs

Family Life

On Easter you dye Easter Eggs!  Easter for our family certainly holds a lot of traditions.  First of all it is important in our family to recognize why we are celebrating Easter.  It is because our Jesus died for us and rose again.  I want our children to understand that but there are certainly many secular Easter traditions that our family practices as well one of those is DYING EASTER EGGS.  

Dying Easter Eggs Can Be So Boring

I used to have a love hate relationship with dying Easter Eggs.  The idea of coloring eggs seemed so much fun but good Lord buying the same old dye packs from the grocery store every. single. year. got old.  And yeah, sure-they had some fun themes like wax crayons, glitter, stickers, etc.  But it still got uninteresting fast and it never really turned out as nice looking as advertised.  So one year, I decided to do a “Pin it and Try it” science experiment with Easter Eggs.  I found a few pins and we all voted on some that we would like to try.  Each year, we try out different dying techniques and this year-we picked six techniques to try and vote on which eggs we liked the best.  

This year we tried

• Dying Eggs with Colored Rice
• Glitter Bomb Eggs
• Kwik Stik Eggs
• Tissue Paper Eggs
• Tie-Dye Eggs
• Shaving Cream Eggs

I have explained what we felt about each egg dying technique, what we did, and what you need for each technique below.

Dying Easter Eggs with Colored Rice

Family Favorite and Biggest Surprise

Very quick, easy, and not messy (as long as the ziplock bags are closed-if not then you will have colored grains of rice EVERYWHERE!)

What you need

• Hard Boiled Eggs (make sure they are dry.)
• Rice-We had brown rice in the pantry already but you can use any type
• Food Coloiring
• Ziplock Bags-one for each color you use.

What to do

1. Fill up a few ziplock bags with rice (I didn’t exactly measure but I am guesstimating we used about a cup of rice in each bag.) Then we picked a color for each bag.  
2. Put a few drops of food coloring in the rice and made sure the bag was shut tightly.  I then had the children shake the bag until all the color was mixed with the rice. 
3. Then put the egg in the bag and shake until you are satisfied with your egg!  The pattern and the color came out really well for ours!   

Brother liked to keep his style classic so he would do just one color for each egg.  But Big Sister loved mixing and matching each egg so she had a few different color combinations. 

 (You may need to add extra drops of food coloring if you reuse the same bag more than once.)

Afterwards, I poured all the rice in a little tupperware dish so that Brother was able to play with them for sensory play.  

Glitter Bomb Easter Eggs

Big Sister’s Favorite and Voted Most Beautiful

Very quick, hands on, and very messy!

What you need

• Hard Boiled Eggs
• Ziplock Bags (we rinsed out and reused the bags from our rice bags.
• Food Coloring and/or Glue Stick
• Glitter

What to do

1. I originally had everyone put the egg in a ziplock bag with food coloring and shake it until the egg was covered with color.  However, The Hubs got the brilliant idea to use a glue stick.  He covered his egg with glue before putting it in the ziplock bag.  Either way, the results are the same but the glue stick makes it a LITTLE bit less messy
2. After you cover your egg with food coloring or glue immediately pour a little glitter into the bag and shake. 
3. Add different colors of glitter to your egg until you are satisfied!

 Now you have Glitter Bomb Eggs!  They are gorgeous but very messy.  I’m still finding glitter in the baby’s hair.  (A bag wasn’t shut all the way before shaking. OOPS.)  Also, the egg will leave glitter on everything it touches.  So SUPER MESSY!  But incredibly beautiful!

Kwik Stix Easter Eggs

Most Fun!!  

Quick, Easy, and Not messy

Y’all. If you haven’t heard of Kwik Stix-they are awesome!! I LOVE THEM!  We use them all the time for my son’s preschool crafts.  They are tempura paint in stick form which controls the mess and they dry immediately.  It is my son’s favorite way to add color to any of his crafts! 

What you need

• Hard Boiled Eggs (still warm)
• Kwik Stix

What to do

1.  With this project, you will need warm eggs.  After boiling your eggs let them sit for a minute so they are not too hot to touch and then go to town with your Kwik Stix!  
2. Do whatever you want with them. The Kwik Stix glide on the egg easily and then dry automatically so you don’t have to worry about fingerprint smudges.  My son just drew squiggle lines and my daughter and I enjoyed coloring patterns, shapes, and words on it!  The colors were vibrant and there was no mess on our hands.  
3. 
   

Tissue Paper Easter Eggs

My Favorite! 

Time Consuming, Fun, Messy, and Beautiful.

What you need

• Hard Boiled Eggs
• Spray Bottle with water
• Bleeding Tissue Paper (make sure it is bleeding tissue paper or else the colors won’t bleed onto the egg.)

What to do

1. For this one, cut out several scraps of bleeding tissue paper before getting started.  Be sure to put them on a dry surface because you do not want them to get wet before putting them on your egg.  Otherwise, the color will bleed on whatever the tissue paper is touching.
2. If your egg is not wet, spray it with water.  (As you can see we just left ours in a bowl of water.)
3. Then DECOUPAGE!  Stick those beautiful pieces of paper to your egg and create any kind of pattern or style you would like.  
4. Spray the egg with water again and let it sit for ten minutes.  
5. Then, gently lift the scraps of paper off your egg. 
6. 
   

VIOLA! You have beautifully colored Easter Eggs.  Your fingers will be just as pretty because the color is running off the paper while you are handling the eggs.  You can wear gloves of course but our family doesn’t like the hassle.  We’d rather have colorful hands for some time and a fun story to tell anyone who notices.

 Tie Dye Easter Eggs

Time Consuming, Messy, Colorful, Smelly, Uses Lots of Food Coloring.

We’ve done these for two years now and I have to say, it’s not my favorite but it does make for some very colorful eggs. 

What you need

• Hard Boiled Eggs
• Paper Towels
• Rubberbands
• Food Coloring
• Spray Bottle filled with water and vinegar mixture

What to do

1. Wrap you eggs in a paper towel and bound it with a rubber band.  Be sure that there is only one layer of paper towel or else the food coloring will not reach the egg.  
2. Spray the paper towel that is covering the egg with the water and vinegar.  
3. Then drop tie dye food colors onto the paper towels. 
4. Spray the egg again with water and vinegar, and let sit for 10-15 minutes (the longer the better.) 
5. Unwrap the egg and PRESTO-a colorful tie dyed egg.
6. 
   

 I found that it wasn’t easy for my to manipulate where the drops of food coloring went (maybe next year I will use a dropper instead of dropping it straight from the bottle.) and therefore I had a lot of blank spots on my eggs.  

I think this one is very similar to the Tissue Paper technique which I personally prefer.  The tissue paper eggs turned out to be so beautiful and you had a little bit more control with how each egg turned out.  (Plus it wasn’t as stinky because it didn’t use Vinegar.)

Shaving Cream Easter Eggs

LEAST FAVORITE

Time Consuming, The Messiest, Really Really Messy, Did I mention it was Messy, and Overall a Disappointment.

What you need

1. Hard Boiled Eggs
2. Shaving Cream Foam (not gel)
3. Muffin Tin
4. Food Coloring

What to do

1. Fill the muffin tin with shaving cream and then drop some food coloring into the shaving cream. The drops of color did not move through the shaving cream (which was actually a great recap of a chemistry lesson that Big Sister just did.) So we could not create any fun patterns only solitary colors.  
   
2. You need to stir up the shaving cream to get the color in there and then put the egg into the shaving cream.  Be sure that the shaving cream covers the egg. 
3. Let the egg sit for 10 to 15 minutes and then rinse it with cold water.  (We took the egg out of the shaving cream without rinsing and then let it sit but I think you can just let it sit in the shaving cream the entire time for less of a mess.)
4. In theory, your egg should have a vibrant color now but the only color that really worked for us was red.  Nothing else really stuck to the egg.  

We have tried this technique for two years now and I don’t think we will be trying it again.  There was shaving cream EVERYWHERE which would have been fine if the eggs came out a beautiful color but they didn’t.   So we will find a replacement for next Easter.

Which ones do you want to try next Easter?  Which one is your favorite?  What Egg Dying Technique have you done that we haven’t tried? 

Also check out our families fun ways to learn how to Eat Healthy

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