Our youngest will be five this fall and I’m pretty sure that I have never dyed Easter eggs with her. I have photographic evidence that I’ve done this with the older three, but Little Lulubelle has gotten the short end of the stick, I’m afraid. So, this year, motivated by the highly crafty, creative, and motivated nanny of a friend of mine, I thought I would give it a try for the sake of Lulubelle and, er, memories and all that good stuff.

I had sort of put it off as an impossible sort of thing to do while we were in Ireland, because all of the eggs in Ireland (well, not really ALL – but the vast majority) are brown eggs. If you asked for white eggs, the shop keepers and workers tend to steer you towards fancy shops that carry white duck eggs. My friend’s nanny had gone on about all these tutorials she had looked up and her plans to dye eggs with my friend’s kids while we were chatting during our kids’ playdate. It made me feel a little guilty and so, I decided I too would dye eggs with my youngest progeny in order to give her some memories. You can buy egg dying kits similar to those you find in the U.S. in Lidl and Aldi during Easter time, but I never felt the need to try any of those.

I was determined NOT to buy anything special to dye our eggs. So, luckily, I had exactly 7 eggs left in the fridge and I had a pack of Wilton food colouring pots that I used to colour our birthday cake frostings. After looking at a few tutorials online, I also determined that I needed some white vinegar which I luckily had because I had accidentally purchased some white malt vinegar which does NOT taste at all like the distilled vinegar that I needed. So, it was languishing unused in the back of the cupboard waiting for it’s moment to shine.

I googled dying brown eggs and came up with all sorts of search results. Some of them suggested making your own natural dyes by dying things like onion skin and red cabbage. I was like, hmmm. no thanks. My friend’s nanny was going this natural route, but I felt like we needed to keep this as simple as possible. So, I generally followed the egg dyeing tips by this farm-y blogger gal at Rockfarmer.me. Generally, as in I used mugs and jars around the house, some vinegar, papertowels, and food colouring. Since I had paste style food colouring, I just put a little scoop from a spoon into each jar with the water and vinegar. My oldest, the Monkey, came into the kitchen at one point, gagged, said, “My god! What is that awful smell!!”, and quickly left.

The kids swirled the eggs around (I, of course, boiled all seven eggs first). We waited. We had some pizza. Some turned out better than others, and the best ones were a nice rich, muted, vintage-y red, yellow, and green colours with the brown (instead of white) egg base. In the end, everyone was happy, and I felt like we had accomplished our Easter egg dyeing.