Friday, April 2, 2010

Rainbow's Rainbow Eggs

Each year Rainbow and I have dyed eggs for Easter. We leave them in a basket on the back step for the Easter Bunny or his helper the Easter Bilby to hide in our garden on Easter Morning and hope that maybe he'll leave us a chocolate egg or chocolate Bilby to find too. Yes - we do have an Easter Bilby here in Australia. The rabbit is actually a terrible feral animal in our country which results in degradation of the land and leads to the demise of many species (including our lovely bilby). But perhaps I should leave that discussion for another day.
Now I shan't teach you how to suck eggs or blow eggs as the case may be. But I will briefly share our experiment this year in dying rainbow eggs. Can you see the top three...Hollow eggs of course float. So you simply float the egg in one colour dye. Then after desired time (the longer the deeper the colour) you lift it out pat it dry and lower it into the next colour. This continues until your egg is rainbow. This is so simple that Rainbow was able to do this by herself - though it is hard waiting, waiting, waiting.
You also get more colours on the egg that you anticipate as when the colours overlap you make new colours. I think in years to come this will be great to predict and discover how colours mix.
If you haven't dyed your own eggs before. Here's the recipe we use.
1 T vinegar
1/4t food colouring (you may need to add more to get the desired colour)
3/4c boiling water. (I'm not sure why it needs to be boiling. In the past we have reused the water over several days, successfully.)
We also did a few wax resist ones by drawing on the eggs with crayons first. I'm not sure if you can see them in the picture.

4 comments:

  1. Beautiful. And I really like the idea of using the dyed eggs in the easter egg hunt. I must confess I have been too lazy to blow eggs thus far, I think my sons would probably break them anyway. This year we managed to break a hard-boiled egg!

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  2. These look fun! Yes, projects that include waiting are always hard for little ones.

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  3. I love the idea of floating the blown eggs in different colour dye. We dyed eggs the other day and ended up putting a bowl on top of the eggs to keep them under the water.

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  4. Hi Cheryl,
    We've tried a few things to submerge the eggs. The best so far is to hold them down with a spoon then wrap an elastic band around the spoons handle and the jar.

    Hi Catherine,
    Yes, I know what you mean. Rainbow just dropped the whole basket and landed on it. We've broken one and cracked two today and it's still another half an hour until bed. Eggs do feel nice to hold.

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