Easter is coming, which means it’s time to color eggs. Our hens are laying like crazy right now & we are getting at least a dozen eggs every day. I thought it would be fun to try out a couple different egg dye kits.
Hard Boiling Fresh Eggs
Hard boiling fresh eggs can be tricky. The shell tends to want to stick to the egg when you peel it. There are a variety of methods to try to fix that problem. The method that works best for me is adding 1 tablespoon of baking soda to the water. Farmer John prefers to steam the eggs.
Update: Recently, I too, have jumped on the steamed eggs bandwagon. The eggs really do peel perfectly. Click here to learn how to steam eggs.
Dye Kit #1
We’ve had these egg dying cups for years. It makes me happy to get them out each year. We have regular paas dye tablets in the cups.
Their fingers are usually just as colored as the eggs.
Our dark brown Marans eggs produced rich, jewel toned colors.
Dye Kit #2
The second kit we tried came with camouflage stickers. It also came with dye to color the eggs first. But, I just stuck the stickers on our brown eggs. I don’t love these eggs as much as I thought I would.
We’ve been incubating & hatching chicks, so naturally I had to take pics of them with the decorated eggs.
Dye Kit #3
The last kit we tried involved rubbing metallic paper on colored eggs. I love how they turned out, but the kit only decorated 5 eggs. There was one extra piece of metallic paper, but the glue was gone. I tried decorating the eggs first, before giving the metallic paper to my kids. It ended up being quite a chore for me to do it that I never ended up letting my kids try. So although they are pretty, they are not worth the effort.
My Favorite
When it comes right down to it, I don’t need the fancy dye kits. My favorite eggs are the one that are plain & only one color. Since the eggs from our chickens have a range of colors, one set of dye tablets produced a large variety of colors.
Wishing everybody a Happy Easter!
