Tina sent in a timely article from The Dollar Stretcher, one of the oldest and best money-saving sites on the web. (It’s been around since 1996, and looks like its design hasn’t changed since!) Jenny Wanderscheid has some suggestions for creating Easter decorations with stuff you probably have in your kitchen.
Wanderscheid’s recipe for naturally-dyed Easter eggs:
Put eggs in a single layer in a pan. Pour water in pan until the eggs are covered. Add about a teaspoon of vinegar. Add the natural dye appropriate to the color you want your eggs to be. (The more eggs your are dying at a time, the more dye you will need to use.) Bring water to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 15 minutes. Remove the substance you used to color the eggs. Put eggs in a bowl. If you want your eggs to be a darker shade, cover them with dye and let them stand overnight in the refrigerator.
And just what are these natural dyes to which the recipe refers? To achieve the colors below, use the corresponding household items.
- Pale red: fresh beets or cranberries, frozen raspberries
- Orange: yellow onion skins
- Light yellow: orange or lemon peels, carrot tops, celery seed, or ground cumin
- Yellow: ground turmeric
- Pale green: spinach leaves
- Green-gold: yellow delicious apple peels
- Blue: canned blueberries or red cabbage leaves
- Beige to brown: strong brewed coffee
For more clever Easter egg ideas, including more advanced techniques for fancy decorating, read the entire article. You can find more Easter egg ideas at Child Fun. (But beware the sea of advertising — if GRS ever gets like this, please give me grief!) Finally, I had fun browsing Flickr for Easter egg photos — you may, too.
[The Dollar Stretcher: Decorating Easter Eggs]
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Given the cost of fresh produce, it’s hard to see how wasting good food on easter egg dyes is cheaper than a $1.99 egg dye kit.
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@COD : Exactly my thoughts. Unless you have a giant vegetable garden in your backyard, PAAS is the answer!
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What a couple of Easter scrooges!
Seriously, though, most of these ingredients are things we already have in our kitchen. Grabbing a pinch of this or a bit of that costs pennies and takes no time. And it’s fun.
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I like the idea of using kitchen scraps (free!) like onion skins, citrus & apple peels and the outer leaves of the red cabbage that I would normally throw away. Plus, I think a bonus is showing kids how its possible to make things themselves rather than rely on the “store-bought” version for everything.
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Technically, in the “use what you have without spending money” sense, it is frugal…but yeah, using raspberries instead of food coloring is definitely going to cost more.
However: it’s really cool!! Come on. You know you always wanted to know natural, environmentally-safe, “we could still use this method if we were sucked into a wormhole and stuck in the 3rd century forevermore” methods of dyeing.
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COD, because it’s natural and non-chemical and you know exactly what you will be ingesting.
I did this last year with onion skins, turmeric, beets and red cabbage. I was happy with the results except for the turmeric, which left the eggs with a powdery residue.
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Even cheaper than PAAS, with less packaging: use hot water, salt and food coloring.
There are usually instructions on the back of the food coloring box. Costs pennies.
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C’mon…This is a little extreme…
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Last year, I picked up a PAAS kit for 33 cents during Easter clearance at my local megamart that I plan on using this year. We usually use frozen veggies to cut down on waste, and my cheap-o PAAS is far less expensive for us considering we don’t have access to those sorts of ingredients as a general rule.
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What are these ads you speak of?
**Using Firefox + Adblock Plus**
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If you decide to go the kit route, babble has a review of 5 kits:
http://babble.com/content/articles/columns/top5/007/
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My comment was only directed at the financial sense of doing it. Whether or not it is a good idea for health / environmental / educational reason is a different issue.
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I am sure salt, water and food colouring are cheaper than using produce.
I’ve dyed things using produce before. It’s a neat science experiment, but I wonder how much energy it takes to boil the water long enough.
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Friday Fun: DIY Easter egg dye…
Hoppity-hop, Easter bunnies! If Paas ain’t yo thang, the Get Rich Slowly blog offers a list of natural dyes you can make yourself from common household items to color your eggs. For example, use blueberries for blue eggs, onion……
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It’s not quite as earthy, but KoolAid is another cheap option for dying eggs. My son just did it. It cheap option for dying all kinds of stuff.
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[...] red and coffee for brown. All-natural and fun. Happy egg-coloring! — Gina Trapani Frugal Easter Egg Decorating Tips [Get Rich [...]
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Check out this Instructable for Easter Eggs Dyed With Onion Skins:
http://www.instructables.com/id/ETZZGFEGJTEP286WR7/?ALLSTEPS
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My wife and kids are using my old silk ties to color eggs. They cut up the ties/silk, wrap the eggs, and then wrap with cotton cloth (cut up old sheet)and boil them. The eggs look pretty cool! They got the idea from the Martha Stewart website.
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This comment is a bit late, but no worries here. I like the onion skin look, but instead of making a flat dye do this:
Take the onion skin, red or brown. Wrap your eggs in the skins and secure the skin with elastics.
boil the wrapped eggs.
When you cool them, they have this interesting tye-dye look form the pressure of the elastic bands/string and the crinckle texture as well.
They are the best looking eggs I ahve ever made and it was made with the parts of the food I would otherwise throw away!
not fresh like so many of the nay-sayers commented against
Linderlinder
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