I draw faces with kids’ non-toxic coloring pens.
Did you see Martha Stewart’s column on chocolate-filled Easter eggs? Real eggs, filled with chocolate. I seriously thought about pitting her for that. She is batshit crazy.
Here are some ideas for natural dyes (I’d link you to the published article, but they didn’t post it online; suffice to say this was in our newspaper). I haven’t actually done these myself, but when my kids are older we’ll have a Mr. Wizard Easter & see what happens:
Yellow - to 3 cups of water, add 2 teaspons turmeric and 1 teaspoon vinegar. Soak hard-boiled eggs overnight.
Blue - While simmering eggs to hard-boiled, add a few leaves of red cabbage.
Blue - Or, soak HBEs in grape juice overnight.
Red - While simmering eggs to hard-boiled, add the skins of red onions.
Pink - Soak HBEs overnight in cranberry juice
Rose - Soak HBEs overnight in beet juice
Lavender - Pour boiling hot water over violet blossoms, and soak HBEs overnight
Brown - In 2 cups of hot water, add 2 tablespoons of instant coffee and 1 teaspoon vinegar. Soak HBEs overnight
Tan - While simmering eggs to hard-boiled, add the skins of yellow onions.
That Pyansky thing I could see, those are seriously beautiful. Too much work for me, but beautiful.
Chocolate-filled real Easter eggs are just stupid.
PAAS is where it’s at, folks. I’ve done pyansky-lite, I’ve done marker things, I’ve done tie-dye and marbelizing and glitter, but in the end it always comes back to PAAS. They have way better color than they used to when I was a kid, I tell you, too!
I go to Target the day before Easter, and buy a dozen already-boiled, already-dyed Easter eggs.
What?
A big bowl of water and psychedelic oilies.
The outer skin of a brown onion wrapped around the egg (contain the skin within gauze or something) while it is boiling makes a beautiful dappled yellow on the shell.
I’ve never tried red onions, but I think I will now!!
It’s certainly a lot of work and patience. Plan. Draw on egg with light pencil. Draw in white parts with wax. Soak in yellow for a while. Draw, soak, repeat. The results are marvelous and totally worth it. If you’re working on more than one at once, it’s not too tedious.
Probably not the best idea for four year olds, though… 
Those hexagonal scoopy wires never work though. Always loosing the hard boiled to crack. Bend a severe angle is my best advice… better to cradle.
One time we took some colorful construction paper and a hole puncher and with a bit of glue had lots of fun.
We made psanky in sixth grade once because our teacher was Ukranian. I always wanted to try it on my own but never got around to finding visks. They’re quite awesomely fun though, and you can get much more complex designs than with other methods.
I buy the double kit, that comes with both dipping dye and sponge paints. The youngest Marli goes nuts with the sponge paint, and you can get really cool marbled effects both with that and by wrapping rubber bands around your egg, dying it, letting it dry, removing the rubber bands and applying others, and dipping it in another color.
I’d love to have the patience to do pysanky, though. Those are gorgeous.
I found photographical eviednce of my easter eggs!
You can see them http://img17.exs.cx/img17/6356/agg0ev.jpg From left to right: lizard egg, star egg, non-figurative abstract egg and egg man.
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I just emailed the teacher in Illinois to find out id she would be willing to teach me. That is awesome stuff. I think I will try to get supplies this week.
Straight food coloring (well, okay, food coloring and vinegar or what-have-you). I think it gives you the widest range of choices in terms of colors. Of course, the part of my family that did the Easter egg thing when Iwas a kid is Greek, so it’s more like, “little bottles of food coloring, and one big ass honking bottle of red food coloring.”
And then we got to crack the eggs. Bliss.
Last time I did it I used markers too. I like the precision for drawing the kinds of things I like to draw, and to try to replicate my mom’s traditional Easter basket design egg.
Why? What’s so wrong with chocolate filled eggs? Why do you hate them so much? Am I missing something?