Natural Egg Dye by Natural Earth Paint

Last year we didn't dye eggs for the holiday. Well, I tried to make some homemade dye with cabbage. It didn't work so well. So this past winter when I saw that Natural Earth Paint's Natural Egg Dyes Kit on sale at a discount site, I promptly ordered it. Did it matter that it came before Christmas? Not one stinkin' bit! Since I couldn't make my own dye very well, I needed to find another way.

The two weeks leading up to leading up to Easter, I set aside our white eggs hoping that the dye would work out. Either way, I knew that the white eggs had a much better chance than our brown or even cream colored ones.

My wonderful husband stayed up late last night and hard boiled the 17 white eggs I had managed to set aside. So this morning all we had to do was open the dye package, which stated that we only needed to add hot water, and we would be good to go.

The kit contained four small bags of dye. We emptied each into a half-pint jar with 1/2 cup of hot water. The colors are for yellow, green, blue and purple. There is no red.

The package says to let each egg sit 10-20 minutes. This is not something that toddlers do well so we put one egg in each jar and set them to work with crayons coloring the other eggs with designs.

After about 5 minutes we checked each egg. Between three and ten minutes was all that was needed for each color.

The yellow dye worked the fastest and turned a glorious orange when the egg was left in more than a few minutes. This one stained my hands the worst. The other colors wiped off and faded by the time we were done with eggs but the yellow took a couple of washing to fade.

The blue was the next fastest acting color. The longer the egg was left in the more vibrant the color.

The green took a bit longer to achieve a grass green but had a fresh spring color.

Finally, the purple took by far the longest. Left for only a short time, the egg would be a dull purple but left in for the full 10 minutes or longer and the egg was a deep, rich violet. This picture doesn't show it as well since the egg is still wet but look down at the bottom picture and you can see the color of the eggs in the sunlight. The egg in the middle of the last column on the right was left in the longest and you can see how much darker the purple is compared to even the one below it.

All of the eggs came out beautifully. In fact, the kids loved them so much that they wanted more eggs to dye. We hard boiled another 15 of the mixed brown ones and a few of our Golden Maran's eggs (they are naturally speckled). Those eggs are not included in the pictures because we dyed them later while we were eating lunch. The darker brown though did require more time. We left them in for 30 minutes. The colors were not as vibrant but they were dark and lovely.

Here is what our 16 white eggs look like (I know I said 17 eggs above but we gave one to E to color and she instead worked to crack it and eat it so we let her eat it and skip the dying):

I am so happy with this kit that I plan to buy it again next year and use it. The colors came out great and I am not concerned about weird dyes and chemicals on the eggs. At $10 some might say that it is pricey but I like knowing what I am putting on my food. Also, since this is a once a year expense, I think it is worth it. We don't spend a lot of money on the little things for Easter so $10 plus the $2 I spent for a book of mazes for each of the boys isn't exactly an expensive holiday craft. We have used other products by this company and everything has always been quality. For us, this product is definitely worth purchasing.

Have you used Natural Egg Dyes Kit or another natural egg dying kit?