undyed easter eggs

We started doing our easter egg hunt on saturday a few years ago so we could focus on more Christ-centered activities Easter Sunday.

This meant we needed to get our eggs done tonight! It was a little difficult with Rachel at track practice until 5ish and Carly leaving on a pre-prom date at 6ish...

When I got home from work I boiled a dozen eggs and left for the store for more. Mason accompanied me while carly was in a whirl of baking at home. She decided to make bread for the family and for the sacrament for one of her Personal Progress goals and crepes for a friend's birthday and for the family. Believe it or not she said "I had a stressful day... I wanted to cook!" I think she may have taken on a little much because she was in a whirl when I got back from shopping. I helped her with the Raspberry sauce and the pudding but she was doing pretty well on her own. I dunked the 1st dozen eggs in ice water to cool and started the 2nd dozen to boil.

Rachel had gotten home at 4ish and Carly wasn't leaving til 7ish so that gave us a little more breathing room! I set the kids to putting away groceries, cleaning off the table, cutting up tissue paper and grating crayons.

I know those last 2 don't make a whole lot of sense when you think our objective was to decorate eggs but wait! It will makes sense momentarily.

I decided to try some nontraditional egg decorating this year.

Samantha grated several colors of crayons on separate plates and we set the whole tub of crayons on the table. You have to use really hot eggs so this wouldn't be good with real little kids and the wax can really make a mess.

You need something to stand your egg on. We used egg carton cups cut down to a small size. you either sprinkle your egg with crayon shavings and watch them melt and drip

or put some shavings on your disposable tablecloth and roll the egg around in them

use a regular crayon to draw right on the egg

or drop a few shavings on and smear them around in designs with your fingers.

The possibilities are endless.

There is a lot of melding of colors, dripping and so forth. You don't have a lot of control over what the colors will do and we learned a lot of "what to do's" and "what not to do's" if we ever want to do it this way again.

The eggs were really hot and they have to be to get the desired melting so that was interesting but the kids were all old enough to handle it. This was Samantha's "hurry and take the picture this egg is burning my fingers! face"

The 2nd kind of egg decorating we did was with watered down white school glue and tissue paper.

You start with cold eggs on this one.

Thank Goodness.

You just cut different colors of tissue paper into squares

water down some glue

get some paintbrushes

and start layering tissue paper

and "painting" the glue over each piece

I really liked the way these turned out.

There was more creativity this year

a little more mess...

and a lot more fun!

We had it all done & cleaned up when

he showed up to whisk her away at 7ish