Dipping and Dyeing Fun

Every year the girls and I dye eggs and do a few crafts for Easter.  Check out what we did in 2012 for eggs, and for crafts.  2013 we did our annual egg hunt itself and last year we did it all in one day, with Nana and Grampa.  It is fun, and the girls look forward to it every year.   But, as much fun as we have, I always feel bad when I end up throwing so many of the beautiful eggs away because we always have too many.

This year I stumbled into the perfect solution.  I was at the grocery store when I found buckets that contained everything we needed to marble plastic eggs.  Plastic eggs that I didn't have to throw away, and that we could keep until next year...Sold.

The instructions were simple enough.  Empty the bucket and fill 2/3 full with cold water.  Attach one of the skewers into the hole on the bottom of one of the plastic eggs.  Drop some marbling paint into the water, swirl your design and the dip the egg while holding the skewer.  And it really was that easy, though we did get much better at it as we went along.  Like most things...I snapped pics with my phone as the girls did it all - almost 100% by themselves!  Now that is a first.

The eggs were fast and easy.  They took 15 minutes to finish and about 15 minutes to dry.  And I now have the perfect thing to put in my Easter basket in the hallway.

MadHatter's first drop...(notice that we skewered all of the eggs first).

Swirling her design...

Ready to dip the first egg...

And the results were not what we expected.  We didn't put in enough of the marbling paint...We swirled it too much and most importantly, we didn't blow the excess paint out of the way when pulling the egg out, which resulted in the egg picking up color on the way into the water and on the way out.  Lesson learned.  Except Stinkerbell wanted one just like MadHatters so we made the same "mistakes" again, just for her.

Cleaning out the buckets between eggs was super easy.  You just needed a piece of white paper.  Yep, paper.  The paint, which had solidified a bit, was instantly attracted and soaked up by it.  I think the paper turned out really pretty.  We may take the excess paints and make some wrapping paper this way...

MadHatter's second attempt...

Stinkerbell did the paint dropping, and I did the design.  The rest was all her...

And this was the bottom...

And the side.  We were definitely getting the hang of it.

Each of them did 8.  And I think all of them turned out great...

I poked holes with the sticks in an old egg carton to hold them while they were drying...

And 15 minutes later my basket was full of the pretties eggs.  That I am so thankful I do not have to throw away, but can store until next year.  I guess this year I tackled eggs and crafting all in one project.  Yay!!!

 But that doesn't mean I got away with not having to do a craft.  They still wanted to color and cut so I printed these, and they did the rest...

 

And I guess you could say these were my craft.

Happy Easter Everyone!