Try these techniques for egg-ceptional Easter eggs

Editor's note: This story is from April 2014. 

I can visualize how a room ought to be decorated for a party, but I usually leave the execution to others, because my crafting skills are not exactly Martha Stewart-esque.

So when I tell you that you can decorate your Easter eggs this year without resorting to a store-bought egg-dyeing kit, you can believe me.

If I — an un-Martha — can do it, so can you.

I trawled the Internet for ideas, and I’ve assigned each egg-dyeing project a score on the difficulty scale (1 being the easiest; 5 being the most difficult).

Kool-Aid as egg dye

You simply add two-thirds of a cup of water to a 20-cent Kool-Aid packet in a plastic cup, and then use as you would standard Easter egg dyes.

Pro-tip: Grape Kool-Aid turns eggs a stormy hue, but Orange Kool-Aid works great.

Level of difficulty: 1.

Worth it? Yes. Kool-Aid smells better than the vinegar required by those kits that use color tablets. And it was cheap. (I so wanted to type “cheep” there.)

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Use onion skins

I found the next idea at Instructables.com: dyeing eggs with onion skins.

The Greek Orthodox dye their Easter eggs a deep red using yellow onion skins.

This technique also uses yellow onion skins.

You’ll need an 8-inch square piece of white cloth for each egg (I cut up an old T-shirt).

Everything needs to be wet: the pieces of cloth, the onion skins, the eggs themselves.

Rinse the pieces of cloth in water; soak the onion skins in a bowl of water.

When the skins are soft and pliable, wrap some around an egg. Then wrap a piece of cloth around the onion-skin-wrapped egg, and fasten with a rubber band.

Add each little egg bundle to a stainless pot of boiling water, and boil for at least seven minutes.

When the eggs are hard-boiled, remove the bundles carefully with a pair of tongs or a large slotted spoon.

Peel away the cloth and the onion skins, and you should have eggs that look like butterscotch marble (or the planet Mars, according to photographer Rick Hertzler).

Level of difficulty: 4 (twisting a rubber band around the ends of a wet piece of cloth, while keeping an uncooked egg intact, is a bit of a challenge).

Worth it? My kids want colorful eggs, not art, on Easter morning, but I thought these eggs looked lovely.

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Shaving cream eggs

I found this project at athriftymom.com but you can find it elsewhere online.

Get a cheap can of shaving cream — not gel — and line the bottom of a foil pan with a layer of the cream (no more than an inch).

Drop random dots of two or three hues of food color onto the shaving cream.

Drag a toothpick or the skinny end of a chopstick through the shaving cream to create swirls of color.

Then simply roll a hard-boiled egg, with shell, in a straight line through the shaving cream, and repeat with the rest of your eggs.

Place the cream-covered eggs on a piece of cardboard to dry. After about 10 minutes, when the eggs are dry, gently wipe away the shaving cream with a paper towel.

You should have tie-dyed eggs.

Level of difficulty: 2.

Worth it? I’m not sure you want your eggs to smell like shaving cream.

Also, egg shells are porous. While shaving cream isn’t that toxic, it’s potentially toxic enough to merit a “shaving cream poisoning” entry on the National Institutes of Health’s MedlinePlus website.

I repeated the project using generic Cool Whip — as suggested by the website spendwithpennies.com —instead of shaving cream.

The whipped topping had just defrosted, so it was still a bit stiff.

It worked great.

The eggs smelled less like a barbershop, and more like a bakery.

And bonus: A search for “whipped topping poisoning” on MedlinePlus did not yield any results.

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All-natural egg dyes

Chef Tara Zhookoff, culinary instructor at Lancaster County Career & Technology Center, uses everything from cabbage to cranberries to dye Easter eggs.

She says you should boil fruits, vegetables or spices in 1 1/2 cups of water — unless otherwise specified below — to produce a dye that looks darker than the color you want. Strain the dye with cheesecloth, and then add 1 tablespoon of white vinegar. Soak your hard-boiled eggs in the dye.

Brown eggs: 1 cup of brewed strong coffee.

Deep purple: Red wine (no boiling necessary for wine or juice).

Lavender: 1 bag of frozen blueberries, or 2-3 Red Zinger tea bags.

Deep gold: 3 tablespoons of turmeric.

Blue: 3/4 of a head of red cabbage (chopped).

Gray-blue: 2 cans of blueberries and their juice.

Green: 4 cups of spinach leaves, canned blueberries and their juice, and a few tablespoons of turmeric.

Red: 3 cans of beets in cranberry juice (instead of water).

Light pink: 2 cups of cranberry juice or frozen raspberries.

Brick-red: 3 tablespoons or more of paprika.

Orange: 4 carrot tops and skins of 4 yellow onions.

Also try boiling raw eggs for 12 to 15 minutes using leaves from the backyard, grass, fresh herbs, rice or any other organic item wrapped in red onion leaves and tied up in cheese cloth to give your eggs a textured look, Zhookoff said.