Decorated Easter Eggs

Some of my favorite craft bloggers have been sharing their Easter egg decorating ideas lately (Alisa Burke post 1, post 2, and post 3, and Aunt Peaches  post 1 and post 2 ), so I felt like sharing my own collection of hand-decorated Easter eggs.  Decorating Easter eggs is a tradition my mother and I started, and we try to work together on a few eggs every year.  It’s a wonderful way to exercise our creative energies and spend quality time together.  There are so many fun options for paint, ribbon, glitter, sequins, fabric, decoupage and more!  Because we blow the contents out of the shells first, the eggs will not go bad and can be cherished for years.

We’ve been decorating eggs for a number of years now.  I can’t remember exactly when we first started.  We keep our eggs together in a basket that we bring out for decoration around Easter time.  I photographed the eggs of previous years as well as some of those we created this year.  I hope you enjoy the slideshow:

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If you’d like to create your own Easter eggs like this, first you have to blow out the yolk and white.  You may find this video helpful, or these instructions, or you can follow my directions, which vary slightly.

You’ll need:

• 1 egg (or more)
• a marker
• a large needle or similar pointed tool
• a bowl, preferably one with a sealable lid
• paper towels
• sanitizing spray or wipes 

 

1. First, mark the poles of the egg with a marker, top and bottom.
2. Shake the egg vigorously in your hand (but be careful not to let it slip and fly!)  This helps break up the inner membrane structure of the egg, allowing the yolk to escape later more easily. 
3. Then using a sharp object like a large needle, poke a hole through the shell, using the mark to guide you.  I used a sculpting tool with a pointed end to do this.  Be careful not to grip the egg too hard, lest you shatter it.  (Drills can be used for larger eggs.)
4. Once you’ve pierced the shell, gently work the tool in a circular motion to wear away the shell, chipping and widening the opening. 
5. Repeat on the opposite end, making sure the end of the egg has a slightly larger opening.
6. Then hold the egg over the bowl.  I’ve found it’s easier to empty the contents of the egg when the larger pole of the egg is facing down, closer to the bowl.  (If you use Tupperware, you can save the egg yolk and white in the fridge for an omelette later.  The video tutorial says otherwise, but I think this is debatable.)
7. At this point you may choose to clean the end of the egg, press your lips to the shell, and blow out the contents, or you may opt for a safer option(salmonella risk) and use a medicine syringe or straw to blow the egg out.  Whatever method you use, be sure to blow all of the egg out.  If you’re struggling to empty the egg, make sure you completed step 2, or consider widening the holes on the poles of your egg.
8. Once you’ve blown all the innards of the egg out, I recommend sitting it on a paper towel in a vertical position for a few hours, so that any remaining residue may run out the bottom end.  This prevents issues later on.

I’m sorry I didn’t take pictures and make a nice tutorial.  I hope the included video and instructional website will suffice.  If you have questions, feel free to write them in the comment box below.

Nail Polish

I bought ten bottles of nail polish this week.  I know, it’s a bit of a splurge, but after this week I deserve it (and they were on sale for super cheap).  Plus I’ve been waiting a long time to expand my collection, so it’s not like I do this all the time.  I love nail polish, and I have an extensive collection – forty-seven bottles.  Yup, that’s a lot of nail polish.  But as an artist, I find the colors incredibly inspiring.  Having a plethora of color options is important. (You needn’t worry, most of these I’ve collected as gifts through the years. Some of them are quite ancient.)

My collection prior to the new additions.

I think my fascination with nail polish is closely tied to my artistic inclination and visual predominance.  I love nail polish because it’s a socially acceptable form of painting on myself.  It’s a form of decoration that is temporary – I can change it as often as I wish. Having a spectrum of nail polish allows me plenty of options for every occasion.  Every color carries a different mood, and owning many choices allows me to mix and match for even more variety!

I think at this point I own all of the major colors.  Because I’m admittedly a bit OCD I enjoy sorting my collection according to color.  The best challenge is to try to line up every bottle in a color spectrum from one end to the other, fading from one color to the next as smoothly as possible.  It looks pretty neat when I succeed.

This potential for color spectrum inspired a recent project in an art class.  The assignment was to create a color wheel prior to exploring color theory.  Naturally my nail polish collection sprang to mind.  I went home and created a nail polish color wheel for reference, substituting bottles where I didn’t have the right hue.

As I created the reference shot and sketched my initial color wheel, I was intrigued by the wide variety of bottle shapes/styles.  Some where round while others square, rectangular or triangular.  Some had sharp angles while others gently curved with smooth planar transitions.  Some bottles were stubby while others were tall.  There were white caps, black caps, gray caps and chrome caps.  The caps varied in height and circumference, some completely vertical while others widened toward the base.  Our schema of a nail polish bottle tends to be pretty simple, but when you start to analyze their designs you realize how different each brand is!

In my nail polish color wheel I incorporated these bottle design differences, making them different shapes and sizes.  The innermost bottles, the primary colors, I left without caps so that their “polish” might spill inward and run together.  The secondary color bottles I included caps on, and made their caps slightly darker than those on the tertiary bottles, to subtly define the different tiers.

 Because the focus of the project was on color, not value, I limited my use of shading, and instead gave the bottles faint highlights of white paint and shadows of black paint.  I kept the lines crisp and clean, so as to barely hint at a glossy glass bottle.

A nail polish inspired color wheel. Unfortunately my camera was unable to faithfully capture the darker colors. The blue-green, blue-violet, and red-violet don't show well in this photo.