Let the Easter Craft Posts Begin!

My family did a ton for Easter. In fact, my mom and I stayed up quite late perfecting our Easter Eggs. So, in a series of posts because they're all kind of long, I'm going to cover the various techniques I used to do my eggs this year. I spent a good deal of time looking up new things on Pinterest to try out, and selected several that I thought I would enjoy.

I did napkins painted on with egg white, following this tutorial here:
http://www.larecetadelafelicidad.com/en/2013/03/easter-eggs-napkins.html

I also used the egg white trick (which is natural and safer to eat than any glues and such that you might put on an egg) to do some fun with sprinkles, which happened to be my favorite of all my eggs. I'm dreading having to eat it soon.

I did a fun trick with pantyhose and leaves to make natural silhouette eggs, my second favorite of all the eggs. For that I followed the tutorial here:
http://scissorsandspoons.com/onion-skin-dyed-decorative-eggs-terra-cotta-colored-decorative-eggs/
without the onion skins. I used regular egg dye instead.

We used rubber bands to make designs on the eggs.

And then, of course, I had to melt crayons all over my eggs. My moms turned out the best out of these sets. (She's got a masters degree in art, so I expected nothing less)

I'm going to go through each of these one at a time, and I know it's past Easter, but at least you can try these out with less mistakes than me next year! (Or just for fun)

The first of all these was my egg yolk napkin deal.
You need:
Hard Boiled eggs
Patterned napkins
One egg, not hard boiled (the tutorial has listed a ton of egg white, but I found that I barely even used any of the one egg I cracked open. I left it intact and just dipped my brush avoiding the yolk)
A paint brush, preferably medium to large size

 It turned out pretty well, minus me not quite tearing off enough napkin. The tutorial said to cut the napkin into fourths, but since I was using a Pokemon patterned napkin, I tore off a large chunk with Pikachu as the centerpiece.

Like I said, I was using a Pokemon patterned napkin that my mommy picked up at a wholesale auction warehouse in bulk. We have have tons of them. It's super cute, and I could've picked any character to highlight, but the Pikachu was the right size and adorable. I also really liked the napkin she used in her tutorial, but I hadn't known that I was going to be doing this or I would've gone and picked some cool ones up from the store.

With a character or design, first decide what you want the focal point to be. Then, lay it out on the front of the egg, centered as you want it to show. Now, I didn't measure and just ripped, and ended up not having quite enough of the napkin to cover an egg. this happened to leave me with a very large spot on the back uncovered, and resulted in a large ugly patch of another section of napkin that didn't match. So, lesson learned, figure out exactly how much napkin you need. It's better to have extra that you can tear or cut off when you're done. There will be a seam of sorts at the back of the egg. There's really no way around this, but it doesn't look too bad in the end.

Make sure you take ONLY the printed layer of the napkin. Any other layers underneath are bulky and will prevent the napkin from completely sticking to the egg. Center your chunk where it needs to be, and then apply a bit of the egg white to wet it down to the egg. Then brush outward from that spot in a sunburst fashion. This keeps it as smooth as possible, and results in not tearing the napkin doing multiple strokes in different directions. I let mine dry in sections before continuing so that it was easier to hold on to when painting.

Allowing my egg to dry after brushing on the front of the design

When you reach the back, try to make sure your brush isn't too dry. If it's dry, there's more friction and it might end up tearing the napkin. Just brush everything as smoothly as possible towards the back of the egg into a seam, and then cover it up with a patch if you didn't have enough napkin or think that it doesn't look just right.

You can also use this method to put just cutout designs on the egg, using small chunks of napkin design. A decoupage would look nice as well, I think. Complete coverage, but no orderly fashion to the design. Here is mine:

FYI: If you have extra egg yolk left over at the end, and you have doggies, let them have whatever's left. It makes their coat shiny and is good for them overall. I gave mine to my sweet puppy, Leo.