Coloring Eggs With Natural Dyes: A Recipe Review and Tip Roundup

Egg season is upon us! Whether you are celebrating Easter with a bonnet and a basket, or simply enjoying the ongoing nesting of your backyard birds, springtime is synonymous with The Egg. It’s likely that many of you plan to color eggs over the coming week, for display and hunting this weekend. If you’d like to try something a different than the typical grocery store dye kit, we suggest coloring your eggs with natural ingredients. Naturally dyed eggs will take a bit more work than the store bought kits, but the creativity, shade variations and recipes are almost endless. And, if you’d rather limit the ingestion and exposure of less-than-natural substances for you and your family, this is the way to go!

Easter Eggs Naturally Dyed – The Video!

Ever since that nettle juice left a beautiful marbled stain on our test egg last month, Our Localtopia has been thrilled by the idea of naturally dying eggs! There are a number of well known natural egg dyes like beets, tea, blueberries and coffee. We tried those, but also decided to test out some lesser known sources of natural pigment, like the featured oxalis flowers. The results were stunning, and captured in the attached film. The directions for dying your own eggs is at the end.

#1. Beet juice and onion skins. Egg was boiled in beet juice after being wrapped in an onion skin.
#2. Boiled with onion skins and soaked over night.
#3. Boiled grass, soaked over night.
#4. Turmeric, soaked over night.
#5. Boiled with onion skins, removed from water right after boiling.
#6. Black Tea, soaked over night.

The Nettle Easter Egg!

We’ve been working on so many exciting projects, that we’ve been too busy to blog! But no worries, we’ve been taking careful notes and will soon be sharing them all with you. The picture above is a sneak peek. This is a naturally dyed egg… Dyed using stinging nettle, a local weed that is easy to harvest and actually quite delicious. Stay tuned for future posts on eating stinging nettle, creating naturally dyed holiday eggs and much more!

The Nettle Egg