Can you believe Sunday is Easter? It creeped up on me this year. Hazel is beyond the age of decorating eggs with me. I however love decorating eggs even though we don't do it very often. I had a supply of wooden eggs and paper mâché eggs that open and decided to try some of the ideas in Show-How Guides: Egg Decorating by Renee Kurilla and illustrated by Keith Zoo, plus I came up with some of my own.
From the Publisher:
SHOW-HOW GUIDES: EGG DECORATING is a primer for curious minds with a clear, fun graphic style that invites any kid to get started designing and decorating eggs.This pocket-sized 101 includes a curated collection of 18 essential dying and decorating techniques. Every step is illustrated, allowing kids to easily master the basics, regardless of how they learn.
Readers will learn to dye, dip, and paint dazzling eggs with natural dyes, food coloring, glitter, glue, and other glitz, cut-paper crafts, and more.
SHOW-HOW GUIDES is a collectible, visual, step-by-step series that teaches the skills every kid should know, at a shockingly affordable price. They're the perfect stocking stuffer, birthday gift, or impulse buy.
From Me:
This small guide has some creative ideas. It begins with how to make hard boiled eggs as well as making your own dyes either with food coloring or all natural using food and spices. It also shares ideas like using rubber bands, tape and more to make designs while dying the eggs. After the dying ideas comes painting ideas. I tried some of these. Now I will add personally I would not use paint on real eggs if you plan to eat them! The first was sponge painting and then using a toothbrush to splatter spots of bright paint on it. My old toothbrush was not very flexible and did not splatter, but I tried this with a wooden egg.
I also tried it with the larger paper mâché eggs. I had painted it orange first.
There is a bit of glitter on both, because some glitter was left on the wax paper. I also photographed them both while they were still wet. Another idea was to paint with bubble wrap. Here is where I wish I had a print version of the guide. Since it was digital, I looked at it quickly and then tried to do the project by memory. I messed it up a little. I plopped the pain onto the bubble wrap instead of brushing different colors onto it. I did use two different shades of blue paint though. You can see some of the bubble wrap print on it.
Another paint idea was to paint with leaves and nature. Now my biggest problem is it is early spring and there are not many leaves out where I live yet. I scrounged around and found some daffodil leaves as well as a few other small leaves including a lupine bunch. I sacrificed a small lupine branch to get the flower like effect. Overall, my nature painting was not a favorite method.
However, it did give me an idea to make an egg decorated with nature. I saw something on Facebook the other day of people making flat Easter eggs out of cardboard and decorating them with various nature. I made this one. It looked much better when the flowers were fresh. Definitely not one that will last long.
Next are the glitter eggs or as I like to call them sparkle eggs (be sure to check out the book The Sparkle Egg). I made two of these.
It really depends on the glitter you use for the effect. I did find it hard to completely cover the eggs with glitter even though I brushed on the glue.
There were also glitter design ideas like a spiral and polka dots. I tried the polka dots since I had a sponge dotter to put the glue on the egg. I used an egg that I painted orange first (a bubble wrap failure).
The final egg design I tried from the book was gluing paper on to it. They suggested using tissue paper which would have worked better. Since I was starting with a paper mâché egg, I used thicker paper. I had a bunch of paper squares cut out from making paper hydrangea art. It didn't glue as well. I also added a twig cross on to it from my nature egg idea.
The book continued with creating egg rabbits, and more as well as displays of your eggs. There were some very creative ideas shared. Since gnomes are everywhere these days I decided to go off book and make a gnome egg.
To make the gnome egg, I measured around the egg for the hat and then created it. I decided to make it striped since it is an Easter gnome. I glued everything so it can be done with kids. I used some fiberfill or stuffing for his hair and beard. Then I glued on a wooden bead for his nose and decided to give him some eyes. I did cover the bottom half of the egg with felt as well so he isn't naked.
For more Easter egg ideas be sure to check out Easter Eggs Around the World, Flower covered eggs, egg chick, fabric wrapped eggs, and egg bunnies & chicks.
