Naturally Dyed Easter Eggs

Spring is in the air!  The Tabebuia trees are in full bloom here in Florida.  The bright yellow trumpet-like flowers are so beautiful, though fleeting!

Our Easter holiday traditions have slowly gotten more eco-friendly along with my interests in natural dyeing and natural living.  The kids have pink and blue wire baskets that I fill with reusable eco-grass and fill with British and organic candies (my husband is originally from the UK).  For the past few years we’ve also been experimenting with Natural dyes for our Easter Eggs.

This year I went with some tried and true simple colors.  We used onion skins(orange/brown) that I’ve been saving up for the past month, beets(red/pink), acai puree(brown/grey) and a mixture of green tea and basil(yellowish-green).  My colors are more muted since I used organic brown eggs.   I over-dyed some of the eggs in red cabbage(light blue/purple) as well.

The kids and I also experimented with wrapping some of our eggs with flowers.  We picked these flowers on our walk home from school and then tied up our bundles out of square cuts of mesh fabric from my lingerie stash and secured them with rubber bands.

For each color I boiled the veggies/peelings in water and then after cooling/straining the liquid added the pre-cooked eggs.  I added 1 Tablespoon of vinegar to each batch of dye.  The trick to stronger color is leaving them overnight in the dye bath in the fridge. The color is muted compared to commercial dyes, but still so pretty.   I can’t wait to crack these open for deviled eggs on Easter- they should be lovely!

We used what I had already in the fridge but some other options for color are black beans(grey blue), carrot tops(green), turmeric(yellow), and blueberries(blue).  Happy Spring!