Happy Crafty Monday!
Last year I was visiting family in Vienna right before Easter, and I loved all the decorations. Every shop and restaurant was decorated with branches strung with hanging Easter eggs. It was positively captivating! And I knew I just had to try and recreate the effect at home. And thus began my experimenting with different egg decorating techniques, some of which I thought I’d share with you today.
For all of these designs I used real egg shells, carefully blown and washed. Honestly one of the hardest parts was getting the thread from one side to the other, and in the future I might take some inspiration from the beautiful eggs I saw in Vienna and use a pretty grosgrain ribbon instead. The first set I made were decorated with sharpie, in a variety of patterns and simple drawings. So far I stuck with just white shells, but it might be pretty to incorporate some brown ones too. These eggs are simple to recreate and no fancy supplies necessary, just a clean shell and your favorite sharpie! I love the crisp black and white, but it could look really pretty with some brightly colored grosgrain ribbon too. I am envisioning a whole tree with black and white eggs and a rainbow of different ribbons. Though a simple color palette of pinks and greens could be elegant too.
The second design I played around started with a design that would pair well with my sharpie decorated eggs. Shells stamped with alphabet letters! I have a bunch of different sets of letter stamps, mostly purchased from the $1 bin at Michael’s, and so I played around with a few different letter types, plus color combinations.
I love the idea of the white on the brown shell, but the white ink I had was a thicker paint-like ink, and it retained a bit of it’s sticky quality which I didn’t like.
The black ink I had was from a more traditional harder ink pad, so the ink didn’t have that thick paint-like quality and I like how it looks on the egg shell better. It was certainly fun to play around with the different colors and fonts. Each time I try a new version I like it better than the last. The one problem with the thinner ink was that it was a bit slippery, and every now and then as I tried to stamp the letter my hand would slip slightly and smudge the ink. You can see a couple of smudgy places on these eggs but it doesn’t really ruin the look so it’s not the end of the world.
The third design reminds me a bit of one of those snowball deserts with the coconut. I had a bunch of confetti created from scraps of coffee filters both dyed and plain white and I thought it might look fun glued on an egg. I smeared hot glue on the egg shell in small areas at a time, and then just dipped and rolled it in the confetti. It wasn’t what I was expecting but I kind of love it. It’s very ‘snowball coconut dessert’, if you ask me.
I then decided to try decoupaging the confetti with mod podge, and again it wasn’t really what I was envisioning but it’s kind of cool. I think next time I might try a much paler pink, the colors all got much more saturated as they bled, and I was envisioning a paler color palette to better match the beautiful quince branches I used as my Easter tree.
I hope you enjoy these different decorating options, and if you try any of them for yourself I’d love to see the results!
Ciao, Allison