One of my absolute favorite Easter traditions is dyeing eggs with my parents. For as long as I can remember, my dad has gotten a kick out of mixing all the colors together and attempting to make a black egg. From an early age, he taught me to do the same. Mom’s rule is that we have to make one “good” egg of each color, then we’re free to mix colors as we please. We have a contest to see who can get the ugliest egg; sometimes the winner is a dark gray, sometimes it’s army green, sometimes it’s baby-poop brown…we like the challenge of continually trying for something uglier than the last one.
We were going to do our annual egg-dyeing today, but my dad ended up having to work, so it got postponed until tomorrow. In the meantime, since we’d promised Little Crafter an egg project, I decided we’d try something I saw in the March issue of Family Fun. It involves using crayons on really hot hard-boiled eggs. I was a part-intrigued, part-skeptical. Then, I saw a post over at Red Ted Art where she actually tried it with her son and it turned out pretty well. I figured, why not give it a go. Here’s what we did:
MELTED CRAYON EGGS
Materials:
eggs
crayons
Does it get any simpler than that? 🙂
STEP 1: Collect a pile of well-used crayons that you don’t mind parting with and peel the labels off.
STEP 2: Hard boil as many eggs as you’d like to decorate this way. We only did 4, in part because we’ll be dyeing several dozen more tomorrow and in part because I wasn’t sure how they’d turn out. 🙂
STEP 3: While eggs are still hot, place crayon on shell and you’ll notice it starting to melt. Once it melts, move it around on the surface of the egg to add vibrant, fun color.
You’ll get the best results if you leave the crayon in one place until it starts melting, then move it around once it’s good and gooey.
Here are our finished products:
Mine kind of looks like a Christmas egg…lol.
LC’s favorite masterpiece.
All 4 eggs on display.
One major plus of this technique {for Dad, anyway}, is that you can use black…or brown or gray…crayon to make the blackest ugliest egg you can imagine!
Hindsight is 20/20, and looking back, I would’ve had a better plan for how to stand the eggs up while we decorated them. They were too hot to hold, but the carton kept too much of them hidden at one time. Maybe a cut up TP holder would have been a good stand…ah well, live and learn! All in all, I thought they were just lovely for our first attempt and Little Crafter had a ball doing it. Now if only I could get him to actually like eating eggs…
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This is a fun idea! Too bad we used all of our crayons to make stained glass hearts out of shaved crayon and wax paper… looks like I will just have to get some more;)
This is a fun idea! Too bad we used all of our crayons to make stained glass hearts out of shaved crayon and wax paper… looks like I will just have to get some more;)
So cool! I think we’re going to be doing these same melted crayon eggs tonight or tomorrow. Thanks for the tips!
Please oh please do the scuba diving eggs from the same magazine…Pleeeeeease?
Laughing so hard about the baby poop color! Love the eggs though!
Kerri
I really like this idea. I have older kids that like to get creative with their eggs. We will have to give this a try.