It was definitely Effective in coloring the eggs, mostly various shades of brown. They look nice, earthy. You're not going to get the bright, fun colors you get with the egg dye kits, of course. If you have a variety of juices around, maybe.
I found the dye wasn't overly durable. Drying the eggs I did manage to scrape the color off in places. So, not so great for eggs that are going to be handled.
This is also a long process. I left my eggs to dye for about 6 hours. So, not great for those with no patience and not so great for kids who want to spend an hour having fun dying eggs and seeing instant results.
Here's how I did it. First, I poked around my kitchen while the eggs cooked and came up with 7 things I would use to try to dye them with. Here's what I came up with:
Hibiscus Flowers - A hand-full
Coffee - Leftover grounds out of the Aeropress from the morning coffee.
Irish Breakfast Tea - 1 bag
Red Raspberry Tea - 1 bag
Paprika - 1 Tbsp
Turmeric - 1 Tbsp
Blueberry Juice - From draining a can of blueberries we used for blueberry pancakes.
I put the cooked eggs away in the fridge and left the containers of "dye" to steep and cool off while we had breakfast. Once the water had cooled off I dropped 1 or 2 eggs into each container of "dye" and put them all into the fridge where they sat for 6 hours. Then I pulled them all out:
Would I do this again? Maybe, maybe not. The egg dying kits are more fun to play with, but this was definitely a fun experiment, so I'm at least glad I gave it a go.
Happy Trails,
~Molasses