Activities & Days Out / 3 April, 2019 / Nanny Anita

How to Tie-Dye an Egg

Last year when we tried to dye some eggs it ended in a miserable failure, all we actually managed to do was bleach the eggs white. This year I thought about trying again, but instead went with a new idea I had seen on housingaforest.com; tie dying eggs with sharpies and rubbing alcohol. I mean it does not get any simpler than that, and if this didn’t work, then I was going to hang up my egg dying hat for good. Thankfully, it worked beautiful and produced some really stunning results.

Whoops!

Remember these eggs are purely for decoration, you can’t eat them. The ink and the rubbing alcohol will seep through and make it toxic to eat.

 To tie-dye your own eggs you will need:

• Sharpies
• Rubbing alcohol
• Pipette
• White eggs – if you can’t find white eggs then it will work just as well on brown.
• Tray
• Bottle top

How to: 

1. If your eggs have been stored in the fridge take them out and let them warm up to room temperature, if you decorate them as soon as you take them out they will begin to sweat and ruin the effect. You could hard boil the egg or hollow them out by blowing all the contents out. We used raw eggs and only ended up with one broken egg.

2. Decorate the whole of your egg, the more colour you add the better the result will be, as there will be more colour to bleed into each other.

Our eggs before we put rubbing alcohol on them

3. Use the bottle top to stand your egg up in as you slowly drip the rubbing alcohol onto the egg, again doing it slowly will give the colours more time to mix.

4. Leave the eggs to dry.

When doing this activity make sure that you are doing it in a well-ventilated area, as the fumes from the rubbing alcohol can be quite over powering. We did this activity over a tray to contain any mess, which was great when my eldest charge dropped his egg while decorating it.

Both charges had a really good time doing this craft, and listening to their chatter as they were describing what they were designing was very interesting and entertaining, my youngest charge was determined to use Darth Vader colours on her eggs, pity we didn’t have any black sharpies for her to use, she was very happy using lots of other colours which she deemed appropriate.

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