Ah the smell of vinegar and the hands of many colors – it is the time of coloring the Easter eggs. Last year we decided to deviate from the path and try something new. Pinterest idea – the shaving cream method. The end result some marbled-looking eggs with a side of messy fun.
It’s really quite simple
- Containers that are deep (2-3 inches) and wider are preferred to be able to utilize multiple colors
- Food coloring dye – colors of your choice (McCormick has neon colors now – which my daughter gravitated to immediately)
- A can or two of shaving cream
- Hardboiled eggs
- Rack to dry them on
- Newspaper for managing messes
- Hard boil those eggs and cool
- Put shaving cream into container
- Drop a few drops of no more than 3 colors into the shaving cream (if you try to go past 3 colors – you kind of end up with a solid color)
4. Put the egg into the container and swirl it around in the colors
5. When satisfied transfer to a rack to dry (hint: put something under rack to catch drips).
6. Based on the pinterest comments – the longer you leave them to dry the more intense the colors. We left ours out overnight – since we had already figured we weren’t going to eat them.
7. All in all – after 24 hours, there was just a little bit of left over shaving cream to wipe off. The colors were pretty stunning. It was a little disappointing because the initial look of the eggs is really cool and the end result is a little more smooth than you might expect.
Lessons Learned:
- this is messy and fingers will be all kinds of colors – just like when you do normal dying
- choose some strong contrasting colors
- once the colors “blend” change out your shaving cream
- the dye-able craft eggs at places like Michaels and Target don’t lend well to this (soaking in liquids for extended periods – and quite frankly they didn’t manage well in the regular dye-bath either in our opinion)
I saw a suggestion to try “cool-whip” instead of shaving cream so you have edible eggs. I think we’re going to give that a try this year.
Ratings from the kids:
- 9 year old boy actually participated in this and this only – he was too bored to do the normal coloring of eggs
- 7 year old girl – artist creative type – liked it a lot but was a bit disappointed that the very distinct designs were lost at the end
- Both said they would like to try it again
