Color Eggstravaganza

What fun to color Easter eggs – especially Chinese Easter eggs! As Kerri mentioned in the comments to a previous post, most of the eggs in China are brown, and a pretty deep brown at that (Kerri, that was a great idea to use markers to color dark eggs -- I would never have thought of that!). We didn’t find white ones, but we did find some extremely pale brown eggs. In fact, the palest eggs you see in the photo are not that far off from the original color of the eggs. Between Maya's impatience and inability to leave the eggs in the blue dye long enough, and the lack of vinegar to mix in to make the colors brighter, we have a few eggs that don't merit the title, "Color Eggstravaganza!"

Those green spots you see are the stickers each egg had -- I couldn't get them off for love or money, and boiling in water didn't help! And each egg was stamped with Chinese characters – look closely and you can see the writing even after the egg has been dyed!

See, it really IS a Chinese Easter egg!

I think the girls were as excited to wear plastic aprons as they were to actually color the eggs. For 60 cents each, the aprons were a steal! Not only did I swathe them in plastic, I did the same for the floor and the table. But we dyed without incident, I’m happy to say.

The one item we have in abundance in our apartment is tea cups -- our apartment came equipped with enough cups to serve tea to the whole third floor, I think. They became perfect egg-dying cups. So while it looks like the girls are having a tea party, that really isn’t the vilest colored tea you’ve ever seen!

I mean, I’ve heard of green tea, but blue tea? Purple tea?

Actually, our purple tea created pink eggs. We were supposed to have 6 color tablets in our box of egg dye, but we only had 4 tablets and a bunch of powder. It seems that purple and red did not survive the baggage handlers. So that became a VERY strong cup of purplish-pinkish dye. Zoe was happy with that since pink is her favorite color (you could probably tell that from the statistical anomoly of fully 1/3 of the eggs colored pink when we had 5 colors to choose from!). But yellow will do in a pinch, too!

The box of dye came with stickers to put on the eggs, but the girls were too impatient to wait for the eggs to dry before decorating them. So I suggested they used the stickers to turn their beach buckets into Easter buckets. But that apparently required a wardrobe change . . . .

All in all, the girls had a ball with all their Easter decorating. Bring on the Easter Bunny, we’re all set!