Do or Dye

We’re running out of time. The deadline is nearly here so drop everything and get down to business. This is serious. Tax filing, you ask? No! Egg-dying, silly. Easter will be here in a matter of hours and if you haven’t dyed your eggs yet, there’s not a minute to waste!

If I’m being honest, egg decorating was not even on my radar last week. I’ve been extra-busy with other things, but when I stumbled upon a Michael's craft magazine with a beautifully-designed egg on the cover, I felt inspired. Yes, but don’t I have tons of stuff to do this week? Stuff for the kids, the house, the growing weed collection in the yard. Not to mention the Mt. Everest-sized laundry pile to put away. And I should work on taxes a little.

Well, that settles it. Egg-embellishing it is!

Inside the craft magazine there were detailed instructions about how to create a gorgeous mosaic-looking egg. Oh dear. The instructions are longer than those for assembling a working automobile. It’s stunning but it would take me literally until next Easter to finish:

Plan B: color my own eggs with food coloring gel (which I already had), and fabric pieces from my sewing stash.

After doing a little idea-gathering online, I decided to try silk-dying some eggs. The results were beautiful, and a little unpredictable, which (as I have found with tie-dying) is part of the fun. Plus, if you have scraps of silk in your sewing stash, it costs nothing and is actually quite easy as the silk does the work for you!

Hubby walked in while I was in the early stages of this experiment and gave me what certainly is not the first strange look he’s ever directed toward me. “What are you doing?” he asked skeptically. I removed my mouth from the egg shell in my hands and said, “Blowing egg goo out. Obviously!” He left and I continued to blow hot air (apparently I have a healthy supply) through a tiny hole in one end of the egg, out the slightly bigger hole in the other end. (Also used a rubber ball syringe, which is very effective.) Repeated with two more eggs.

Online directions advise that you wrap your piece of silk as tightly as possible around your egg. This transfers the silk design onto the egg better. I guess my wrapping job varied, as one of my eggs turned out with a detailed design but the other two had watercolory results with less defined shapes. Oh well. They’re still pretty.

This egg captured some of the silk pattern against it but next time I’d wrap it tighter:

This silk-dyed egg transferred the magenta pattern beautifully! It’s a tiny work of art:

 

On a roll, I decided to do more egg-decorating, and found a few items from my craft stash to use. I wondered whether I could stencil a doily pattern onto an egg. My food coloring was too watery though, and the result wasn’t as defined as it might have been. Ah well. It still has personality.

I decided to use a Sharpie to do some fine-lined designs on an egg:

Gluing a pretty piece of lace onto the shell gives this egg a creative look:

Now I have a cute decoration for our table tomorrow. I like the variety in the looks of these eggs, and it was fun to try different techniques with them. But now I must scurry off to get some Easter baskets ready for tomorrow morning. The Easter Bunny is visiting our house, but he may need some help, so off I hop.

Happy Easter!