By: Will Herndon, Jacquie Hauth, Brad Westover, Piotr Stapor

Acids and bases have many uses around the home. Acids are commonly found in foods and bases are found in cleaners, and they all have useful properies. So how can we use them to make Easter eggs? Well, many of the acids found in foods can turn colors, if another acid turns them in to the conjugate base which has the color. So now we have a method of dyeing Easter eggs: hard-boil them in a mixture of water, vinegar (an acid), and a natural plant indicator. (The reason they are called indicators is that they do change color when the pH change.) After cooking the eggs, they will retain the color of the indicator they were cooked in, providing an array of festive colors!

These were some of the materials and utensils from Will's kitchen we used for dyeing the eggs.

Some of our ingredients that contained an indicator were the peels of oranges and lemons. These were boiled and vinegar was added to extract and activate the natural indicators in the source.

In this pot we had the citrus peels and ground cumin, all of which added an orange color to the eggs.

This is the pot where we added the ground turmeric. Turmeric turned out to stain things extremely well. This evil, evil substance overflowed and permanently damaged Will's cookware. It was scary.

This pot had fresh cut spinach leaves. These were supposed to have given the eggs a green color, yet it turned out that the indicator might have been too dilute.

This is a picture of four boiling egg pots (coffee, raspberries, lemon and blueberries).

Here are the products of our hard work. The eggs were dyed using various natural indicators. The sources for these indicators used on the eggs are, from upper left, apples, spinach, lemon, and raspberry; from lower left they are coffee, yellow onion skin, blueberry, and turmeric.

Piotr, however, contributed little to the project, as shown in this picture. Just kidding. He ate another pizza, too.

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