natural egg dyes - success and failures

 This year, I wanted to give natural egg dyes a try. I read tons of recipes online that used a variety of different fruits, vegetables and spices. None of these sites, however, had any actual examples of dyed eggs (except one, which was a super done up mag photo - i question it's authenticity). It seemed people loved posting recipes for natural egg dyes, but no one actually bothered to post the eggs. Did they suck? Did the recipes work? I tried seven this year. Here are the successful attempts (all of these were left in for about 20 minutes, except for the cabbage, which was left in the dye for an hour):

 As for our not so successful attempts: carrots (for orange) did nothing, spinach (for green) - nada, cranberries - nope. Next year I think I will get some dollar store paprika for orange (I thought about it this year, but didn't want to run out and definitely didn't want to use our good Penzey's stuff for egg dyes). I'd also like to try and mix maybe the turmeric and the red cabbage to see if I can get a green egg out of it. And possibly, although only if I can find inexpensive frozen berries, raspberries for a more red-pink.

For now though, I'm happy with our little egg experiment. I think they are cute, pastel, soft colors and don't have any weird ingredients. It was kind of interesting though in that they didn't come out in the same colors they dried:

blueberries: these came out more purple, and as they dried they turned this deeper blue hue.

turmeric: they came out more gold, but once dried ended up as a nice, soft yellow


red cabbage: this surprised me the most. it came out much more purple and dried this lovely robin's egg blue.


beets: came out pink, as i imagined. the eggs i pulled out quickly dried more slight purple pink. the ones i left longer in the dye, assuming i would get a darker, more vibrant pink, ended up drying a reddish-brown.