Yes, I know. It is not very expensive to buy Easter egg dye kits.

But since the task can be done very effectively with food coloring, you may as well go “old school” on this project and save a little bit of money.

There are a lot of instructions on the Internet on how to use food coloring for Easter eggs. You are probably already using this stuff to color cake batter or other ingredients, so why not get as much use as you can from the color drops? The other key ingredient is vinegar, which a frugal homemaker would have available in the first place; and you would need vinegar anyway for some of the store-bought kits.

One of the better instruction pages I’ve seen is at Ellen’s Kitchen, because she has a color chart on how to make a rainbow of colors.

And here’s a trick my siblings and I really had fun with: get some crayons and color designs on the egg BEFORE you soak it in the color. One of our usual creations was a strawberry – white crayon dots around the egg, green crayon leaf on top, soak the egg in red color.