This was such a fun way to dye Easter eggs!

Materials we used to dye Easter eggs with shaving cream:

• hard-boiled eggs
• foam shaving cream (the gel type will not work)
• food coloring
• glass pans
• wooden skewers (toothpicks or plastic knives would also work)
• old egg carton (or paper plates with paper towels on top to “set” the wet eggs on)
• paper towels

We did this craft outside for easy clean up with the water hose and so I wouldn’t have shaving cream everywhere inside.  I also had all the kids wear shirts they could get food coloring on, just in case.

 I sprayed the shaving cream in each glass pan, and let the kids play with that by itself for a few minutes.  This activity in itself was exciting and fun as shaving cream is so soft and yet squishy all at the same time. After the shaving cream play, I scraped as much shaving cream off their hands as I could (to not waste) and the kids rinsed their hands under the water hose.

The kids tried to “flatten” the shaving cream in the glass pan on the bottom as best as possible.  I did have to help my three year old with this, and also sprayed a little more shaving cream on top as needed.

Next I showed my children how to drop one drop of food coloring throughout the pan, trying not to concentrate all of the drops in one spot, but ensuring they were dropped throughout.

I had the kids pick three colors each to drop in their dish, to not get crazy with too many colors and end up with brown eggs.

I gave my children a wooden skewer (but a plastic knife would have worked just as well) to move around the shaving cream.  The results were a beautiful work of art that was going to get ruined.  (This is where I remind you to take lots of pictures for posterity and great memories!)

The next step is to roll the egg around in the dyed shaving cream.  My daughter and I made a 30-second video of this, as well as took photos.

 Both my boys mixed the colors on the eggs, rather than rolling, and you can see the result of their mixing was a more even colored egg.  They still came out beautiful, but the rolling effect as on my daughters eggs allowed for the different colors to stick out on the egg individually.

Then, we waited.

I had my children wash their hands again.  We waited about 10-minutes and I suggest waiting longer to get a deeper hue for the colors. Ours turned out pastel and I think if we have waited ten more minutes, the colors would have been more vibrant.  After they spent time outside, it was time to clean off the shaving cream to reveal the colors.

The results were beautiful!  I was surprised.  There’s just no other way to describe it but beautiful (or interesting, I guess.)  The colors swirl around on the shell and the coloring has a certain artistic look to it (in my opinion of course!) On another “mommy note” – I have let my kids eat the vinegar/food coloring dyed eggs before, but I made it very clear that they could not eat these eggs due to the shaving cream.

What a great non-craft day!

If you haven’t been following, we have been celebrating Easter with 12-days of Resurrection Crafts, and this was one our “No Craft” days.  That just means we took a break from coordinating the lesson of Resurrection Eggs with the craft done for the day.

I hope you can try coloring the Easter eggs this way!  I don’t know if we’ll ever going back to regular food-coloring dyed-type again.