Happy Easter & Dying Eggs Using Natural Ingredients

I have to start out this post with a disclaimer. I had planned for this post to be published earlier however our youngest daughter Ella started seizing suddenly today while I was writing and needless to say we had to call 911 and have her taken to the ER. It was incredibly frightening and brought back horrible memories from last year and this post. Long story short it looks as if she suffered from a febrile seizure triggered by a sudden fever. We are home now after spending some time under observation and she is now sleeping in our bed. We'll be following up with doctors this week. It's been a whirlwind day but we are thankful for another happy ending. My heart goes out to those parents who deal with regular seizures...it is a terribly horrific thing to watch.


Happy Resurrection Sunday!! We enjoyed a wonderful church service this morning celebrating the fact that we have a Risen Savior!! How wonderful is that?! "He is not here; he has risen, just as he said..." Matthew 28:6

We've had a busy weekend filled with various Easter activities one of which was dying eggs last night using all natural food ingredients. It's definitely a more time consuming project that the conventional color tablets but I thought it would be fun to show the kids that you can create dyes using colorful foods! Plus I kinda liked the soft colors these food dyes create. These would be great as part of a spring table display and not just on Easter.

In order to keep it simple I decide to try 4 different colors. All the recipes can be found here. I chose pink, blue, yellow and green using beets, cabbage, turmeric and spinach.

From left to right: beets, cabbage, turmeric, beets, cabbage. I did the spinach after these since I only had so many pots to prepare the dye in. For each color we boiled 4 cups of water and then added the food ingredient along with 2 tbsp vinegar and allowed it to cool. Then we poured each color in these canning jars and allowed the eggs to sit for 2-3 hours.

Here are the eggs after sitting in the dyes for about 2-3 hours. It takes much longer for the color to show up using natural dyes. However I particularly love the soft pale look. Sometimes leaving them in the dye overnight will result in deeper color (if you prefer) however we left several overnight (in the fridge) and didn't have much difference. In fact the ones left in the beet dye were actually even lighter than the ones left for a shorter time...weird. You will also see that there are no green eggs. The spinach method didn't work out for us. 

The spinach didn't really take and instead resulted in a very pale yellow. You almost can't even tell in pictures that there is any color at all (but in person they are a pale yellow). Maybe I should've used more spinach. The other 3 colors came out much better. It's trial and error I guess.

We filled this vintage french egg basket with the finished eggs and displayed them on the table along with the whole wheat honey bunny loaves that the kids got in their Easter baskets. We didn't do candy this year. Instead each child got one of these loaves, some fruit leathers, a Lara Bar, a small trinket and a new toy. They didn't even miss the candy :)

And just for fun I took the basket outside to photograph the eggs sitting in the tall grasses :) They're quite pretty against all the brown. I'm glad we tried this dying method!!