Dyeing Easter Eggs - A Messy Endeavor Indeed!

Day 1

I was watching YouTube the other day and I can across a video by Grav3yardGirl (check out her channel here).  She was testing a pin that I had actually seen a while back. The Shaving Cream Method for dyeing Easter Eggs. It looked like a super fun sensory activity as well as a chance to dye our Easter eggs (since I am a total slacker and didn't buy a kit).

This is the pin I had found: Shaving Cream Easter Eggs

A lot of people had commented that you shouldn't eat the eggs after they had sat in shaving cream overnight, so I got on Pinterest and did some digging. I found this pin for edible "shaving cream" eggs, using cool whip. Ah-ha! I can work with that! 

So, what you will need is:

A carton of hard boiled eggs (recipe I use here)

Food coloring (they said use liquid, I didn't have any, so gel it is) 

Cool Whip

Plastic Wrap

A spoon and knife

A baking dish

The pin for edible eggs said to add vinegar to the food coloring before using it. But again, we didn't have any, so I skipped it. More on that later. 

First step: Spread the Cool Whip in the baking dish, like so. 

Second step: Drop food coloring on the cool whip. 

Step Three: Realize that the puppy got into some food coloring.

See the little blue tongue?

The Real Step Three: Swirl the food coloring around with the knife.

I think my kids might have gone a little overboard on the swirling. But it had plenty of streaks of color, so we went with it. 

Step Four: Dip, Roll, and Otherwise Coat the eggs in the cream/color mixture.

Oddly, neither of my kids were into the sensory part of this and flatly refused to touch the cool whip. They used the knife to scoop the cream on top of the eggs. I, on the other hand, now look like the Easter bunny with all of the dye I have on my fingers. 

We were left with this when we were done. 

Yum.

The Last Step:  I lined an egg carton with plastic wrap and put the eggs on that as they came out of the cream mixture. Like so:

And then I covered all of them with another layer of plastic wrap, like so:

I then closed the whole kit and kaboodle and wrapped the outside in plastic wrap to contain the mess. It worked well I might add.

We then put them all in the fridge to sit overnight.

Day 2

We got the kids corralled enough to finish up this project, and they wanted to see the finished product. My 4 year old, Buds, liked the first two, but quickly ran out of patience for how long the cleaning process took. About three eggs in and he was done.  But that is pretty typical for him, so don't hesitate to try with younger kidlets. 

You will need LOTS of paper towels to clean these off. I had read that washing them takes a lot of the color off, so the dry method is best. 

When we unwrapped the eggs this is what we found:

I think the whole thing actually looks prettier today than it did last night.

We gently took them out and wiped them with paper towels. They wiped pretty easily, but we went through almost a whole roll for not quite two dozen eggs. 

And then we were left with these:

Pretty cool huh?

Some of my favorites:

Please note that I am pretty much the worlds worst photographer.  These are actually very pretty and marbled in person.  Not just cloudy gray.

Now, I promised to talk more about the vinegar. I noticed that the eggs that were "bumpy" seemed to hold a lot more dye than the smooth ones. 

See:

I think that the vinegar would break down the shell a little more and allow the egg to pick up more color. So with vinegar you might get even better color.  

Overall I think this method was fun and messy! It might be fun to do red white and blue for the Fourth of July deviled eggs too. 

Have a Blessed Easter and stay messy!