Decorating Easter Eggs with Your Preschooler

Supplies used to decorate easter eggs with the kids

We had a lot of fun decorating eggs this past weekend, it was part of a trial run before my last min “the night before Easter” dying eggstravaganza! We made several different types of egg decorations, polka-dots, painted, striped, little “men” and speckled. The kids had a blast and we even learned something about color theory in the process. Maybe some of our eggs will inspire you.
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What we used to decorate our Easter Eggs:

White vinegar
food dye
a dozen or so eggs
medicine dropper
tacky glue
rubber bands
glitter pen
markers
crayons
a few Paas Egg kits (which included stickers, dye, and an egg dipper – love the egg dipper)

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To make our base colors we used roughly 1/4 a cup of vinegar to 2 tablets of dye from the Paas kits (you can get them in the grocery store or Walmart). We used the neon colors and I loved their brilliance!

Different ideas for decorating eggs:

Take rubber bands and wrap them around your egg. We found that the thicker bands worked better. You can then either dip the eggs into the dye whole, or you can use a medicine dropper to drip dye into the specific sections you are interested in dying (making an almost stained glass effect). The result of dipping the whole egg are some stripes – looks very “modern”. Be careful to not crack your egg.
Take tacky glue and dot the egg, or we drew tiny circles. You can then either wait for the glue to dry and then dye the egg by dipping the whole egg into the water, or you can use your dropper to drip specific areas of your egg. I love the way these circles turned out!
Dip half of your egg in one color and the top half in another color leaving a band of white in the middle. You can make Humpty Dumpty! Draw a face and viola! Your own “Egg Man.” Read the nursery rhyme… and if you are really adventurous, use a non-boiled egg and crack it! My kids thought that was great!
To make a speckled egg, we added some drops of regular food coloring to the Paas dye pills. They did not mix well together (not quite separated like oil and water, but not mixed together) the result was some speckling – Loved it! We speckled some of our dyes and left the others plain. What happened when we added red food coloring to the blue dye? Bright Purple speckles, the red speckles on the orange were not so bright, nor was red on yellow, but we had fun experimenting.
Practice mixing colors. We discovered that mixing the brilliant red with a touch of yellow made a bright orange color. Add some blue to that mix and the brilliance fades and you get a “camouflaged” dye. For a mottled look, instead of dipping, let your kids paint the colors on with a paintbrush.
Drip dye an egg. Using the medicine dropper, drip a color onto your egg (we used orange on one egg and blue on another). Then drop another color over it. What happens to the colors? Ours separated and mixed in some areas making a really fun tie-dyed look.