Homemade Dyed Easter Eggs

Better a week late than never right? I decided that this year instead of using the traditional PAAs dye, I wanted to try homemade/natural dyed eggs. After doing a bit of research online, pretty much all of which said the same thing, I settled on this blog's recipe. If you go to the link, you see that he eggs are all dark, solid, colored eggs. I know this must be possible since people have been using natural dyes for everything for hundreds of years. I, however, did not have this degree of success. This is what my eggs ended up looking like:

They kind of look like dinosaur/bird eggs.

I also ended up blatantly cheating and adding some food coloring to a couple of the dyes as I could tell they were not going to come out otherwise. From left to right, what I used to dye them was (and the color they were supposed to be):

[Orange] Chamomile, Cumin, Chili Powder
[Yellow] Chamomile, Cumin
[Pink!?] Cranberries
[Green] Spinach, Green Tea, 2 drops of green food coloring
[Blue] True Blueberry Tea, 1 drop blue food coloring
[Lavender] Wild Berry Zinger Tea, 1 drop red food coloring

Kitchen science!

This was midway through cooking the eggs and making my dyes. Except for the last two tea ones, I boiled them all with water and vinegar, then strained them. All of them I added another heaping tablespoon of vinegar before dropping in the eggs. I let them sit in the dye overnight. Taking them out the next day was the oddest experience. They had a darker colored film on them that was sloughing off. Perhaps I was supposed to let this dry on them and would have resulted in the dark colors from the blog I referenced. It weirded me out, though, so I washed it off, resulting in the pale, speckled eggs I got. The other weird thing was that they were in the back, bottom of the fridge and so the dyes/eggs froze a little bit. It has made eating them an interesting experience.

Here's a couple close ups of some of the better eggs.

Spinach, green tea, and green food coloring

Cranberries- definitely not pink as advertised!

Blueberry tea and blue food coloring

While it was fun and some of them came out kind of cool, I think I'm going to go back to PAAs next year. In fact, I already bought the dye since it was 50% off after Easter.