Dyeing Easter Eggs with Natural Colors: An Experiment

I thought I'd try a little experiment with the Easter eggs to see if we could get some decent color by using all natural things that we had on hand. When I look around, I see so many lovely and vibrant colors in nature, I thought it would be simple to find something that might give us similar colors on our egg shells. I was mostly wrong this time, though.

I used Blueberry juice concentrate, beet juice (the liquid left after I cooked a beet), and crushed spirulina in water. I added vinegar to hopefully help set the colors, then heated them in the microwave (to hot, but not boiling).

I soaked the eggs for around 10 minutes, then pulled them out to dry. The results were readily apparent: only the beet juice is worth trying again. 

What's even more amazing is that the beet juice egg was brown to start with - such a lovely dark pink it is now! The spirulina egg just looked dirty, and the blueberry juice only highlighted the "A" I'd drawn on the egg in clear crayon. 

So much for natural egg dyes...we'll stick with the tablets again this year!