Dyeing Easter Eggs With Food Coloring (Making Do With What You Have)

 

First, I really want to say how much I appreciate all the e-mails and things offering to send me things to help my family out.  I really do.  At the moment, though, we are doing fine on that end.  Truly!  Honestly, I feel very blessed in that we are doing better than a lot of other people because I’ve always been big on keeping food storage around.  A husband working in construction where we went long periods of time without money coming in turned out to be good training for keeping ahead of inflation as well as I could see panic buying coming back in 2020 and I’ve just been trying to slowly stock up on things ever since.  We have also been blessed to receive food storage from others when they were moving and things, so yeah, we are doing okay.  But, thank you from the bottom of my heart for the thought!

 Also, thank you for the recommendations on quilting and sewing books.  I’ve been using credit card rewards toward food storage and things on Amazon, so I use some of those gift cards to purchase the books people recommended.  I can’t wait to get them in and start expanding my skill set!

 And Happy Easter, by the way!

 I know this post is kind of late, but the weekend was so busy with cleaning and trying to make Easter treats (we are going super simple this year, i.e. cheap, so we skipped the Easter basket and instead are just making some home made goodies instead to cut down on costs.  The kids are enjoying it :).  And so, I thought I’d share something that has saved me some money the last few years.  Dyeing eggs for Easter with food coloring instead of those Easter egg dyeing kits. 

 A shot of our finished eggs are up top.  We scaled back how many hard-boiled eggs we made this year because we are conserving fresh eggs due to the avian flu epidemic and to save money so we didn’t need to buy a whole new dozen eggs just for dyeing them.

 The process is really simple and really doesn’t use many resources.  If you have food coloring in the house and some vinegar (you can use lemon juice in a pinch, but just to warn you the boiled eggs in my experience get a lemony flavor to them, which we didn’t like). 

 Ingredients/Materials:

•  Hard boiled eggs (obviously)
• Tea cups, one for each color you want to make (you can use small bowls or other vessels, but I’ve found that shallow tea cups really work well to dye eggs in).

Add to each tea cup and then stir:

•  1/2 cup boiling water
• 1 tsp. vinegar
• 20 drops or so of food coloring (depending how dark you want your colors to be)

Procedure:

1.  Just place your eggs one at a time into your colors (I wait for the water to cool down to warm so that I don't have to worry about anyone getting burned), wait about five minutes and voila!  Dyed Easter Eggs.

 If you want to make colors like pink and purple and such and don't have those colors of food coloring, McCormick has a really nice bunch of colors you can make with their food colorings online if you Google it.

I really like this method because you don’t need to go out and buy special materials to do it and really it is a good way to use up food coloring.  I try to buy food coloring once about every two years just so that something doesn’t go rancid in it and it throws off the taste of a recipe, so this is a good way to use up a bit more of the food coloring before it inevitably has to get thrown away.

 My family got a bit impatient with the process and pulled the eggs a bit early, so they got kind of a mottled look on the shells, but the kids seemed to really like how they turned out.  This is also one of those activities that Alvah will participate in, which I love as there is a lot he doesn’t show interest in when it comes to holidays.

 So, there you are folks.  A really simple method to dying eggs that you can do with materials you already have around the house.  I’ve even been known to dye eggs on other holidays if I am going to be using hard boiled eggs for something (like potato salad at Fourth of July) just because the kids enjoy it so much. 

Enjoy and I hope you all have a nice Easter holiday!