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Friday, April 6, 2012

Adventures in Egg Dying

As a kid, we always used the little tablets of PAAS to dye our Easter eggs. Didn't everybody? Well this year I decided to try the kool-aid method that I've seen floating around the web. Seemed simple enough, just mix one packet of Kool-Aid with 2/3 of a cup of water and bathe your eggs for awhile. Apparently the drink mix has enough citric acid in it that you don't need to use vinegar to set the colors.

We let them sit in the dye for about an hour, but when we took them out, most were covered in slime. I have no idea what happened, but they were kinda gross. 

See that gunk on the egg? This was one of the milder cases. Some were totally covered, others just a little. Weird. 


Some of the colors came out pretty, but the grape one looks a little disturbing. The kids didn't seem to mind, though. We don't drink kool-aid in our house, so they were completely intrigued, and kept putting their fingers in to try it.  I think we'll take a different approach next year...

13 comments:

  1. Interesting! We won't be trying anything like that I guarantee!

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  2. they may not be the 'prettiest' but the kids' smiles tell me they were fun anyway :)

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  3. hahaha they do look weird but it looks like a lot of fun!! I'd just call them alien eggs and go with it!!

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  4. My guess is it's something to do with the acid; similar to what happens to an egg when you leave it in vinegar in its shell and the whole thing turns rubbery.

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  5. I'm glad your boys enjoyed the slime eggs! It's not a bug -- it's a feature! ;>

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  6. Interesting effect... We don't dye eggs here, mainly because our eggs are brown, so we concentrate on the chocolate kind ;o)

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  7. hi, did you use fresh eggs? eggs that are 10 days old are best, this goes for boiling as well, if you use fresh eggs, the shell sticks to the white, use older eggs and you will see a better result

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  8. Hey, at least you tried. I'm the meanest Mom because we don't dye eggs. I just really can't handle the mess. So you get HUGE points from me :-)

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  9. Umm...we dyed 12 and used a PAAS pack that's been in my pantry for like 2 Easters! haha. It worked, although ours were all pastel because the kids DID NOT want to wait longer than 3 minutes per egg in the dye and because I'm almost out of vinegar and didnt' want to waste much on dyed eggs! And then they said they wouldn't eat any, so I'll be having a colorful snack for a few days this week... ;)

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  10. You're such a good mom! We didn't dye eggs either, but they did dye some at pre-K. I agree about the grape one-lol but the other colors were so vibrant. Looks like lots of fun, slime and all. :o)

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  11. We used the basic Paas dye, but I did consider Kool-aid. I had seen it on Pinterest and thought it looked kind of cool. Now I guess I am glad we didn't go that route. Most of the colors look nice though!

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