How to dye egg shells for art

Textured Art is fabulous for kids to create with and as Easter approaches I thought we would make some dyed egg shells to create some textured art pictures with for some Egg and Easter themed fun. So here’s how to dye egg shells for art.

How to dye egg shells

Materials needed to dye egg shells

Materials needed for dyeing egg shells

Egg Shells
Food Colouring
Zip Lock Bags
Vinegar
Kitchen Paper
Baking Tray or other flat container

How to dye the egg shells

Start off by placing the egg shells into ziplock bags – we had 15 eggs in total that my friends and I had saved for the kids to use (we don’t eat eggs apart from in cooking and baking so I needed some help). We split the eggs into 3 bags to dye them 3 different colours.

Step by Step how to dye egg shells for craft

Once in the bag crush – the eggs can be sharp when they are smashed so we found that using a rolling pin with the kids smashed the egg shells really well and the kids had fun rolling them flat.

How to dye egg shells for art projects with kids

Add to each of the bags a couple off splashes of vinegar and then some of the food colouring. Next it’s shake and of course I had lots of willing helpers to shake the egg shells to coat them with the vinegar and food colouring.

How to dye egg shells with kids

Line a baking tray or other flat container with some paper towel. Tip out the egg shells from the bags into rows and spread out to dry.

Step by step dyeing egg shells

Watch out next week for our textured art project with dyed egg shells it’s been a lot of fun making it.

Author
Cerys Parker

Cerys is a marine biologist, environmental educator, teacher, mum, and home educator from the UK. She loves getting creative, whether it is with simple and easy crafts and ideas, activities to make learning fun, or delicious recipes that you and your kids can cook together you'll find them all shared here on Rainy Day Mum.

3 Comments

  1. Brian Burke says:

    Hi,

    I’m going to try a crushed egg shell project with some kids. My plan is for them to do a picture of a lighthouse using a paint-by-numbers layout. Instead of color, my plan is to do it in gray scale so they practise with the values of a color. From there it is hoped we can move on to other colors and eventually to full color. Can I adjust the shade of the food colorant by regulating the ratio between the colorant and the vinegar?

    1. Hi, I haven’t tried this as with the project wanted to get as vibrant colours as possible. In theory though the more dilute that the food colouring is the less intense the colour will be. With our sea shell dying project I found that they were much paler than the egg shells.

  2. Angela @CreatifulKids says:

    This is so easy! We’ll also try this out:-) For now we painted with egg yolk, which is also kind of fun. Now that we know how to dye them, next step is to use the egg shell in our crafts, and then we have 0 waste 🙂

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