Dye, Eggs! DYE!!!!

So, this year the boys and I decided (read: I decided for the boys and I) to try a lot of different ways to dye our Easter eggs. There were some seriously differing levels of success with these experiments, and I've learned a lot of Do's and Don'ts which I shall now - wanted or not - pass on to you!

Hot Glue Eggs - NOT recommended for the kiddos

This turned out awesome but is a HUGE cheat - I did the decorating with the hot glue, then dropped the eggs in the dye after it dried. It dyed the egg shell but not the glue so I think if I were a little more adventurous, we could've tried to peel off the glue and the pattern would have been in white underneath - but I was afraid of cracking the shell so I just let the kids mess it up - uh, I mean pretty it up - with paints and glitter.

Striped Eggs - you just put a couple rubber bands around the eggs before you drop them in the dye.

The little "egg-droppers" that we made from pipe cleaners were a bust. We had much better luck just using plastic spoons to drop and fish out the eggs.

The striping turned out pretty good. It was not as easy as you'd think to get the rubber bands around the eggs - some fell off once they were dipped, and some just refused to stay on even before they got dipped. After they dried - check out my ghetto egg stand, I just turned a Styrofoam cup upside down and ripped out the bottom :) - the boys decorated them with glitter glue sticks.

Glitter Eggs - glitter is from the Dollar Tree, they have them in little packs of 5 colors in a mix of small and large flakes



This was a huge bust. I used an adhesive spray - we got more glitter on our fingers than on the eggs. Then, it took forever to dry. And then, they wouldn't dye. The spray  - or maybe the glitter? - somehow prevented the dye from sticking to the shell. Maybe rubber cement would have worked better. I dunno, not trying this again.

Two-faced Eggs - massively easy and pretty darn cool-looking, if you ask me.

Yeah, so, it doesn't take a genius to figure out how we did these. Just used shallow dishes and laid the eggs in on one side for a while, took 'em out and let 'em dry a bit, then put them in a shallow dish with another color.

Tie-dyed Eggs using veggie oil - major bust. For some reason, the oil made whatever color we used turn this poopy brown color.

This was one of those pinterest fails. Yes, I followed the directions precisely. It said:
For these just add a tsp. or two of oil into your food coloring mixture
& then dip your egg into 1 color & remove.

 Gently wipe off the excess oil and then dip into another color! 

Dip into as many colors as you like for a cool marbled effect.

Yeah, right. The oil made the dye super slimy and each dip made it more and more poopy brown.

 

Tie-dyed Eggs using dye dropped onto paper towels - SCORE!

These were our biggest success - the boys were able to do it all themselves and they turned out awesome. All they did was put different colored drops of food coloring directly onto a paper towel, then put the egg in the middle, wrapped the paper towel around the egg and dropped it into a plastic bag. We kept it in the plastic bag for maybe ten minutes, took 'em out and got these! So easy and really cool looking! No poopy brown here!

 

Sticker Eggs - no good.

 

Didn't even bother taking a picture of the final product for this one. The stickers came off while the eggs were in the dye. Might have worked if I had better stickers maybe?

 

Fail or not, we had a lot of fun trying these different methods of dying eggs. Now I gotta get off the computer and make some egg salad!