Experimenting with our Easter eggs

I still have a beautiful post in the works to highlight our last vacation but it's taking a while to sort through all of the photos. Needless to say it will make you want to put your toes in the sand right then and there. At least it does for me. Stay tuned for that, but in the meantime...

We (well, I) wanted to try something new for coloring eggs this year. Mostly because I have to take quite a few deep breaths to have Katy dipping spoons into big bowls of staining colored vinegar water and it was too cold to do it outside like last year. She tends to not be the most gentle when it comes to stirring and dipping and I'm not ready to have colored kitchen furniture and flooring.

So, I scoured the internet for other ideas and landed on one that worked out great for us! Just to be safe we did it at Nana and Papa's house. LOL! There were many different variations on this theme but I like where our version landed.

First we assembled everything I thought we'd need. Plastic wrap, food coloring, coffee filters, vinegar and water mixed in a spray bottle and a big space covered in plastic. The sprinkles, stickers and markers were there for additional decoration, should the coloring not work as planned.

We used coffee filters instead of paper towels like most of the sites did. I guess I was thinking eggs are round, coffee filters are round, why not? I dampened them with the spray bottle (worst spray bottle ever in fact but then I was only out $1 when I tossed it after we were done).

We used the food coloring, dropping it onto the filter. I played art director and we stuck to only one or two colors per egg (I try really hard not to but sometimes I can't help it!). When sufficiently covered, I got the filter more damp with the d@&# spray bottle, put the egg in the center and rolled it up, trying to get all sides of the egg touching the colored parts. Katy liked every many drops and I was a bit more shy with mine but both ways worked out.

Each egg got rolled up in plastic wrap and put it's own bucket for 'marinating'. The cup wasn't really necessary but I did it because I brought the cups and by golly I was going to use them.

We tried two using her neon washable paint because I thought it might be more fun if everything was washable :-D but they didn't work out so well. Not too much color and then it all came off on my hands when the egg got some condensation on it. Oh well, at least it washed off easily!

Voila! The eggs are unwrapped to reveal a very cool pattern. Even the ones that I thought would be black from all of the drops of color were rich and colorful.

Here they are all together. Katy's are the more heavily covered ones and you don't really see all the definition of the fun color blends. She really like to use the green and blue. I mixed it up a bit and love all of them!

Unfortunately I don't have a final shot in a pretty plate setting with Easter grass and candy and whatnot but Easter plans got up-ended a little with Nana taking a few days off in the hospital. Everything is all right and she is fine (whew!) but fancy Easter plates got knocked off the list of things to do in the hustle. And, I found a fun use for the eggs so they got used up before the plating would have happened anyway. Look for that post coming soon!

How did you color your eggs this year?