Dyed eggs

After school today, we decorated eggs to kick off our Easter preparations. We used eggs that I had blown last year.

BL has been puzzled why some of her decorated eggs are thrown away, while other eggs, she has made, are kept. It was a great example to show her these ones from last year and how they do not smell. You don’t have to use blown eggs, but they will, of course, last longer.

We started off by painting melted candle wax on to the eggs with a paint brush. TF put a “T” on his with surrounding dots, BL went for dots in a big way and AJ did zig zags, “A” and dots.

(edited: you could use warmed cooking fat instead of the wax. Cutting up sticky tape would give more precise shapes. Obviously, you have to judge what any individual child can handle. What ever you use, it needs to block the dye. )

The older two showed great responsibility with the hot wax, but I helped TF with this stage.

Next, we submerged the eggs into vinegar for about half an hour. The children loved this stage. I wonder why.

Plenty of bubbles. Great revision for how can you tell there is a chemical reaction happening. When the time was up, I took the eggs out and patted dry.

(The vinegar is not wasted. It is now mixed with water and rosemary essential oil, and will be cleaning our kitchen surfaces and windows. Nothing wasted!)

Next stage involved adding food colouring to boiling water. We used red.

They liked this stage as well, as they could put on silly voices and talk about blood, blood, blood. When did they get so ghoulish!

The eggs were added and TF came up with the idea of putting a bowl on top to keep the eggs down. I left the eggs in the red water for about twenty minutes.

Once they were out, I let them dry. The eggs turned out marbled and their patterns are irregular in a natural way. Tomorrow we will thread them on to wire with beads. In true Blue Peter style, here’s one I made earlier.

This is TF’s egg. Unfortunately, he dropped it after painting, so it is not strong enough for him to handle. I put sticky tape on to hold it together, otherwise he would be disappointed. The “T”  shows up well.