Natural Easter Egg Dyes

It’s almost Easter, y’all! Today I had the opportunity to visit with Colleen and Eugene from Charlotte Today on NBC to talk about dyeing eggs for Easter using natural dyes.

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It’s a fun, easy variation on traditional Easter egg dyeing, using natural, food-based dyes instead of synthetic dyes to achieve the colors. I explain the basics in the video above, but here are some specific recipes:

RED DYE
Bring 4 cups of water to a boil. Peel and chop one beet. Place in boiling water along with 1TBS white vinegar. Simmer for 20-30 minutes. Strain beets.

BLUE DYE
Bring 4 cups of water to a boil. Chop one head of purple cabbage. Place in boiling water along with 1TBS white vinegar. Simmer for 20-30 minutes. Strain cabbage.

ORANGE DYE
Bring 4 cups of water to a boil. Peel skins from 6 yellow onions. Place skins in boiling water along with 1TBS white vinegar. Simmer for 20-30 minutes. Strain skins.

YELLOW DYE
Bring 4 cups of water to a boil. Add 6 TBS ground turmeric to water along with 1TBS white vinegar. Stir until turmeric is dissolved. (You can also do this with a 2″ piece of fresh turmeric root. Just chop and add to boiling water with the vinegar. Simmer for 20-30 minutes. Strain.)

Place eggs in dyes for 20-30 minutes, or as long as 24 hours (though your kids probably won’t be patient enough for that). Different lengths of time yield different color results — have fun experimenting to get different colors.

Decorate the eggs with rubber bands, stickers, wax crayon or birthday candle, pressed leaves and flowers. The sky’s the limit!

Combine colors to get secondary colors: dye eggs first in yellow and then in blue to get green; red and blue to get purple.

Make up your own variations! Share them with us on our Facebook page — we’d love to see what you create.

Most of all, have fun!