How to Dye Easter Eggs: 21 fantastic ideas & tutorials

How to dye Easter eggs - ideas and tutorials for everything from food colouring to natural dyes

If you’re like me, you like to make EVERYTHING colourful.

And that includes Easter eggs – after all, if we’re going to dye them, we may as well experiment with colours and techniques. It’s a cheap and easy way to try out marbling, ombre, or resists with a small project.

Let’s get started with the most common egg dyeing technique – food colouring.

Dye Easter Eggs with Food Colouring

Food colouring is an incredibly easy way to dye Easter eggs, and it’s something most of us already have in our kitchen cupboards.

Vinegar acts as a mordant – again, it’s usually already in the cupboard, so dyeing Easter eggs with food colouring is a great idea of last-minute projects.

Solid Dyed Easter Eggs

If you want a pretty basket of solid coloured eggs I have two useful tutorials for you.

First, pastel eggs. Their soft muted colours look gorgeous when jumbled together.

And of course, BRIGHT dyed Easter eggs!

Drip Dyed Easter Eggs

This is another low-mess idea – and I LOVE the inventive idea for DIY egg stands. It would be useful for many of these dyeing ideas.

Coffee Filter Dyed Easter Eggs

These tie-dyed eggs use a coffee filter with food dye for a colourful effect.

Dye Easter Eggs with Coffee Filters

Ombre-Dyed Easter Eggs

Oh, these dip-dyed ombre eggs are amazing! Definitely worth a try – and it’s got me thinking about dyeing tights using a similar method….

Neon Dyed Easter Eggs

I have to admit, I didn’t know neon food colouring was a thing!

But I think we can agree that it makes spectacular dip-dyed eggs.

No-Mess Easter Eggs

This easy tie-dye hack with coffee filters, food colouring, and foil means you can dye eggs without mess.

Great if you have kids who want to get in on the action.

Or adults who tend to be messy crafters. #guilty

Resist-Dyeing Easter Eggs

Take your dyeing technique up a notch by adding in resists!

This brilliant idea uses rubber cement and baking soda – they look like they’ve been ice-dyed!

This method also uses rubber cement, but gets a stunning two-tone effect.

Or how about an easy last-minute idea? Rubber band resists look great!

And finally, resist-dyed eggs with stickers! This is a fantastic idea to get any shape you want.

Silk Dyed Easter Eggs

Or how about using old silk ties to dye eggs? It’s worth a trip to the thrift shop for these gorgeous results.

As you can see from this video tutorial the patterns from the silk reproduce beautifully on the eggs.

Natural Dye for Easter Eggs

If you prefer using natural dye ingredients (and ones you may already have in your kitchen) the following recipes will show you how to dye Easter eggs naturally.

And they also show that no, you definitely don’t need synthetics to get beautiful, vibrant results.

Dyeing Eggs with Cabbage

Dye Easter eggs with cabbage? Yes, you can – and you’ll get a beautifully muted range of colours.

Dyeing Eggs with Onion Skin

And these Ukranian Easter eggs dyed with onion skins are beautiful – the plant resists are a brilliant addition.

Egg Dyeing With Other Natural Dyes

Or how about turmeric, beet, or hibiscus? It turns out all of them dye eggs beautifully.

Dye Easter Eggs with Rice

Bet you never thought you could dye Easter eggs in rice, but using rice and food colouring is a great easy way to get texture on your dyed eggs.

Of course, my favourites are the multi-coloured eggs.

And maybe you can have rainbow rice pudding for dessert?!

Dye Easter Eggs with Shaving Cream

These marble-dyed Easter eggs use only two things – shaving cream and food colouring! Great for last-minute craft projects.

Dye Easter Eggs with Egg Dye

Egg dye is a thing! I first realised this when we were in Athens in the lead-up to Greek Easter. All the shops were selling egg dye, stickers, and other crafty stuff.

I think most people start with egg dye and move on to more adventurous methods, but I suppose I always tend to start from scratch.

Dyed Greek Easter Eggs

I had to start with a Greek recipe, because egg dyeing is not just decorative to the Greeks, or most other Eastern European peoples.

In Greece, eggs are usually dyed on Holy Thursday, ready for Easter Sunday.

Red dye symbolises the blood of Christ, and cracking the egg symbolises his resurrection from the tomb.

You can even play tsougrisma, the egg-cracking game. My Greek-Australian husband remembers playing as a child, before eating tsoureki, the braided bread the eggs were presented in.

Dyed Eggs with….Nail Polish?

OK, this is a bit weird, but marbling with nail polish actually looks great! And it’s a useful project for all those dated colours and half-bottles you have lying around.

This tutorial with a single colour of nail polish gives great results.

And if you want to challenge yourself these multi-coloured Easter eggs marbled with nail polish look fantastic.

Want more quick ideas? This video from Crafty Panda shows 25 quick and easy ways to dye Easter eggs.

After all that, what’s the best way to dye Easter eggs?

I think that it really depends on what you want – bright or pastel, natural or synthetic, single colour or boldly multicoloured. There are so many ways to dye Easter eggs and all the ideas above give beautiful results.

I hope that’s given you many wonderful ideas for dyeing eggs, and you have many enjoyable hours experimenting!

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