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LIVING: Armed Forces
Living Green
Lisa Douglas
Mother of 6
Green Living Aficionado
www.crazyadventuresinparenting.com
Naturally Dye Easter Eggs
by Lisa Douglas posted April 2010
It's that time of year in which the egg dying kits are out in force. What is generally a fun craft for our families also has hidden dangers - the chemicals and dyes involved in those adored kits. Certified food dyes approved by the FDA include colors synthesized from petroleum derivatives and even coal tar-lots of big words there.
Basically, it's filled with a lot of not-so-good stuff. There are other food dyes based on natural ingredients that come from things you may not have ever thought to eat: have you ever heard of carminic acid? It is a commonly used red food coloring which comes from the dried, crushed bodies of pregnant female scale insects called "cochineal". Food coloring = ingestion. Ingesting female pregnant insects? Uh, no thank you.
Besides that grossness, I want my kids to be able to eat the eggs, and since we're an artificially free family, those dyes are out, "natural" or not.
coming...
If you're looking for what you CAN use, here's some great, natural ideas that are fun to concoct and make not only vibrant eggs but allow your children to explore instead of dropping a tablet into water:
For red, try using some red onion skins and boil with your eggs, or let your eggs sit in pomegranate juice or beet juice. For orange, yellow onion skins boiled with eggs come out wonderfully! For yellow, ground turmeric is fantastic when boiled with eggs, but be careful, it stains! For brown, how about some leftover coffee or tea, or black walnut shells? For green, spinach leaves and red cabbage work when boiled with eggs. Not particularly strong, mind you (I like to add some turmeric myself). You can't go wrong using canned blueberries for blue. Purple comes out nicely with some deep grape juice. Any type of berries, such as cranberries or raspberries will make your eggs nicely pink if soaked in their juices for a while.
Please note - when using juice, use it straight; frozen even can be stronger in color content. The longer you let the eggs soak, the deeper the color will be. You can use a scant amount of vegetable oil after the fact to make them shiny, or if you'd like some creative designs, crayons which resist coloring and rubber bands for different effects like tie-dye before or during the dying process. Combine some colors to alter and mix as well!
Enjoy!
Lisa Douglas is a blogger/writer of the parenting blog Crazy Adventures in Parenting, as well as a military wife and mom to six currently stationed at Fort Polk, Louisiana. Lisa is passionate about eating and consuming all-natural and organic products while living as green as possible in the military.
Archives: Green Living
