With the rising cost of eggs in the United States and a swiftly approaching holiday centered around the buying and hiding of said eggs, Easter may be getting a little pricey this year. From a sustainability outlook, holidays are cesspools of wasteful activity, and Easter is not immune to this excessive behavior.
Many have received a gaudy, plastic basket filled with plastic grass and plastic eggs. Sprinkled in is chocolate that may never get eaten, wrapped in plastic that will also be thrown away months after the holiday is over.
This year, I wanted to be more earth-conscious with my buying and easter basket making decisions. Looking online, I found a bunch of dye alternatives, as well as egg alternatives. After going to Artifacts and finding a second-hand basket for all of my goodies, I began trying out these alternatives so you don’t have to.
At Home Dyes vs. Potato Eggs
I started this process super hopeful, but the weird feeling of dyeing potatoes quickly dashed my hopes. To make my own dye, I got turmeric and beets from the Co-op and boiled two pots, one for each element.
The turmeric was super easy. Once the water was boiling, I just added in as much powder as I thought necessary, and it was done. The beets, on the other hand, were the bane of my existence. They took forever to boil, and when straining them after being blended with water, they were still chunky. When the potato “eggs” were put into the dye mixture, they came out with chunks of beet on them, looking the same color as when they went into the mixture.
Potatoes do not have the nice white, smooth surface like eggs do, so color has a hard time sticking to them. If color does stick to them, it’s tinted by the already yellowish outside. The potatoes I was able to salvage were the ones that were placed into the turmeric, but turmeric is also yellow, and so they looked slightly darker, yet still potato-like.
I have little to nothing positive to say about how the potatoes turned out. I do not recommend trying this experiment unless you have a ton of extra potatoes laying around.
Rocks
I was super excited for this experiment, and let me tell you, it did not disappoint. Painting rocks was such a cute little activity, and it has about the same challenge level as dyeing actual eggs.
After scooping up some rocks from outside that looked the most egg-shaped, I picked out the most easter looking colors I could find in my stash of acrylic paint and got to work. The whole process wasn’t too time-consuming and was super fun. The array of colors made it an exciting task to figure out what I wanted to paint on my little rocks. This process had more versatility than with normal eggs.
In the egg dyeing process, you can only shake up the color combos so much before it gets monotonous, and you’ve got seven blue ones and only three red. With this, I had a larger array of colors to work with and could make designs way easier than with actual eggs.
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This wasn’t too wasteful since I didn’t have to buy anything, and now I have decorations around my home until the rain washes the paint off. There was a little mess to this process, but it was nothing some soap couldn’t clean.
Clay
This was the last dyeing process I tried. The original vision for this was salt dough eggs. I had seen this online and thought it would be a low waste, easy task, but after the beet extravaganza earlier I didn’t want to test my luck. So, I decided to try these eggs with some oven dried clay that I had laying around.
Making the egg shape was fairly easy, I wanted to go for more of an egg ornament type vibe since we would be baking them and I didn’t want my place to go down in flames, so after they were flattened out and molded into egg shapes I poked a hole in the top of them and let them bake while still trying to get beet juice off of my counter.
Painting the ornaments was the same process as painting the rocks, and once they were dry, I pulled some string through the hole I had made earlier and tied it to the top of my basket.
The whole experience was super chill, and I think this would be the best if you’re an outside egg hider. The string makes it easy to hide the eggs in all sorts of places, and the white clay made the colors more vivid and alive.
To add some spice to my basket, I cut up some old newspapers that I had lying around. This acted like the plastic grass that is usually put in easter baskets. Overall, the whole experience was super fun, and it quelled my need for some Easter spirit without hurting my bank account or the Earth.
