Sunday, April 24, 2011

Egg Painting 101

I've never been a fan of dying hard boiled eggs. It's messy, it stinks and they are hard to peel (and it's hard to eat that many eggs!) My solution: I bought a pack of wooden eggs from Joann for them to paint with their washable Crayola paint. My thought is that we'll add to the collection every Easter and have lots of memories to look back on over the years. I'm going to date and initial each child's egg so we can keep them straight.

This year, since the boys are only two and Garrett is just a baby, I wanted to do a paint 'technique' rather than just have them paint free-hand. I love them!!

The first technique is to put some drops of paint on plastic wrap, put the egg in the plastic, try it up and give it to the child to squish around and spread the paint. It made a really cool tie-dye effect...
The second was to put drops of paint in a cut out cereal box and to roll and bounce the egg inside the box to spread the paint. It turned out streaked and the colored mixed really nicely after it dried. Next time I wouldn't use white - it dulls the colors a little too much for my liking, but the pastel effect goes nicely with Easter.And the last technique we used today was to paint Garrett's hand and let him grab the wooden egg to leave his handprint and then added the words "Garrett's First Easter." I love capturing the size of their hands in different ways. Super cute!
Other ideas for little kids:
- Putting a few drops of paint on bubble wrap instead of plastic wrap and rolling the egg
- Painting the whole egg a solid color, let it dry and wrap it tightly in a rubber band (choose your pattern). Paint over the rubber band with a different color and unwrap when dry to have a cool line/stripe effect
- Paint the egg a solid color and let the kids paint polka dots using fingerprints

What do you think? Any other techniques to add to the list?

I'm linking up to ABC&123's Show and Tell!

3 comments:

BEwers said...

I love the idea of painting wooden eggs for Easter! I might have to try that from now on.

amy said...

GREAT idea, Beth!! I just saw this on a friend's blog and thought it was realllllly cool:
http://jacquiegraves.blogspot.com/2011/04/silk-dyed-eggs.html
however it does involve vinegar. :) But didn't they turn out gorgeous?!

Heather Benza said...

Fantastic idea!!! Oh how I wish I'd thought of this for my son's first Easter! We will do this next year for sure because the wooden eggs must be gone by now or I'd sneak it in for this year!