Williams Sonoma Eco-Eggs Egg Coloring Kit, reviewed

I’ve always loved dying eggs in the springtime for Easter and have done it just about every year since I was a kid. Whether I’m doing a simple design or a more complex one, the colorful eggs are always fun to make. There are all kinds of kits out there that you can use to dye your eggs, and the Williams Sonoma Eco Eggs Egg Coloring Kit caught my eye this year. The kit includes all natural vegetable dyes that allow you to color your eggs in an eco-friendly way.

The kit is packed in a small egg carton and includes three packets of dye – purple, red and yellow – made of red cabbage, purple sweet potatoes, annattoo seeds and turmeric. Also included are two metal egg dipping tools and a carrot-shaped wax crayon that allows you to easily draw designs on your eggs before coloring them. It is not a big kit, nor does it include a wide range of colors, but the colors it has are good basics and you can use the included color chart to turn those three colors into a total of six colors for your finished eggs.

The packets of dye dissolved easily into cups of water and I kept things simple by starting out by making solid colored eggs. The hard boiled eggs picked up the dye pretty quickly and only needed about 5 minutes in the dye mixture to take on bright, fun colors – much less than the 15-20 minutes that the directions estimated. The yellow color in particular gave the egg a vibrant color almost immediately. The wax crayon was easy to use and easy to remove on the finished eggs, and was a nice inclusion in the box even though the feature was the dye.

The only negative I found is that since there are only three packets of dye, you will have to do a fair bit of waiting around if you want to try to make two-toned eggs, since you can only have three cups of dye going at one time. Still, this is a minor complaint because I don’t really mind spending a leisurely afternoon decorating eggs – although if you are dying eggs with kids, they could become impatient waiting for the dyes to set and you might just want to invest in two kits to speed up the process. Overall, I thought the dyes worked very well and I really liked all the colors I got by working with them. I also appreciate the fact that the kit actually took less time to deliver colorful eggs than the instructions said it would. I would definitely pick up a kit like this one in the future and would just hope to see another color or two added to provide even more variety to the eggs.