Dyeing Red Greek Easter Eggs

It seemed simple enough - I was going to make 12 deep red Easter eggs for my YW lesson on Sunday. Three hours later, and after much aggravation and a lot of laughing, I finally achieved my goal. I still don't know why the red dye didn't work, but I suspect that brown eggs would have worked better than the white ones. Let me know if you have any other ideas. Happy Easter!!

My second trip to the store was to buy more red food coloring AND a bunch of beets. I thought for sure that the red beet water would made the eggs a deeper red.

They still looked more orange than red....

Since I had two extra bottles each of blue, yellow and green AND since Theo came to visit... we ended up making some blue and yellow eggs, too.... Keep in mind that I only really wanted to make 12 deep red eggs...

The stove top was quite colorful, but there were no deep red eggs

These were the eggs that never got any redder. Perhaps it was the beet juice or maybe I put too much white vinegar in the solution.

My hands were redder than the eggs!!

These look like they were laid by anemic flamingoes. By this point I've tried almost everything to get these to turn red. I'm getting frustrated and have spent most of the afternoon on this silly task.

Not what I envisioned!!

Closeup showing all the marks left by the spoon.

After two trips to the store and totally messing up the kitchen I was beginning to think that blue eggs were gorgeous, then I decided to try one more thing.. Voila. Finally I had the deep red eggs I had wanted. These look exactly like the ones I remember from Easter in Greece. (Ted had to go to the store to buy me a sharpie!!)

I got a bit carrried away with the blue guy.

P.S. Do you think we can eat eggs colored with sharpies???

P.P.S The red eggs represent the blood Christ shed on our behalf.