Making dyes from onion skins

Adult supervision required.

Easter is close and everyone is busy with the usual Easter crafts. Coloured eggs is one of the most popular but very predictable!

Today we made our own dyes by boiling onion skins. We used red skins and predicted that the egg shells would be red. They came out more purple but maybe they would have been red if we had used eggs with white shells. That’s something you can find out!

We cracked the shells of some of the eggs before putting them in the dye to make ‘spider man’ eggs. Again our prediction was that we would have a network of spidery red lines but that wasn’t the case!

There was dye left over so we used it to tie dye a white handkerchief.

Then we tried dying pieces of other material to see which took up the dye, always predicting first what we thought would happen.

Last but not least we looked at some pieces of onion skin through a magnifying glass.

Some very interesting discussion arose from the questions asked during all this work with eggs.

Why do chickens come out of some eggs but not others?

Why do we give eggs at Easter?

Why are eggs and chicks symbolic of springtime?

Why do eggs have shells shells?

Why don’t we lay eggs?

It’s fun trying something new!

CLICK HERE FOR THE PROGRAMME VIDEO

Spider-Man Eggs

Link to video instructions

A fun activity which can be adapted to suit all ages.

We always recommend adult supervision.

Uses shaving foam, food colours, hard boiled eggs. We definitely advise wearing disposable gloves unless you don’t mind your fingers looking like the eggs themselves!

We use hard boiled cracked eggs.  The colour can’t penetrate the shell but stains the egg white because it, like your fingers, is a protein! Thus the spidery pattern.

The unde-fives will love playing with the shaving foam.

Older children will take up the challenge to try out different ways to colour the eggs.  Onion skins are good. (Boil them in a little water before adding the cracked eggs.) Frozen fruits of the forest and  fresh berries give varying degrees of pink and purple. (Simply leave the cracked hard boiled eggs in the fruit mixture overnight)

Everyone will find the video fun!

Please note that the colouring does fade so if you want them for Easter morning don’t make until the day before and then peel on Easter Day.