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I love dyeing eggs. And I rather enjoy the magazine Martha Stewart Living. This time of year, the two come together to give me a handful of new techniques for making beautiful reminders of new life.
I also love to host parties, so of course I usually try to have some family over for the occasion. This year, I added some friends and dessert. Just realized that I didn't take a photo of my beautiful green gingham platter filled with luscious red strawberries, to top the angel food cake and homemade whipped cream. You'll just have to imagine.
We tried Martha's stenciled eggs this year. The directions required adhesive vinyl, which you then punch into shapes. Well, I have MANY shape punches, purchased from Creative Memories for scrapbooking, and thought that they would be perfect. They probably would have been, too, if my substitution of contact paper (shelf liner) instead of the vinyl hadn't failed so miserably. The only adhesive vinyl I could find was in large rolls, to put through a Cricut die cut machine. And of course I'm way too cheap to order the correct stuff online. Oh well -live and learn!
But what DID work? Electrical tape, cut into strips and then wrapped around the eggs, or cut into squares. The trick is to pat the eggs dry between colors. The steps I followed for a few of the eggs below:
1. Cut tape & place on egg.
2. Put egg in dye.
3. Pull egg out and pat dry with paper towels.
4. Remove tape, and place new tape, slightly overlapping the still-white areas.
5. Put in another color.
6. Remove, pat dry, remove tape.
7. Ooh and ahh.
What's so awesome about this process is that there's pretty much no way to mess it up. Which makes it PERFECT for doing with kids. Leah and her pal C loved it, and Leah even dreamt about egg dyeing last night, reportedly. The girls are the artists behind the dramatic egg second from the right in the photo below.
For the blue "cracked" egg on the far right, I cut the electrical tape into a jagged line, wrapped it around the egg, and put more tape around the straight edge. Aaron had the fabulous idea to make a looped "handle" and stick a spoon through it to suspend the egg in the dye cup, so that it would stay straight. Smart, huh?
Of course I didn't go out and buy real vinyl letters - I used what we had, which was letter stickers for your mailbox & such. We had to cut the letters out of the white background, and as you can see, they didn't stick too well, but it's kind of a cool effect anyway. We like to make an egg for each member of the family.
Aaron made those striped eggs in the photo above, and Ben did some wax doodling on the other blue egg in front. I like the abstract look.
If you are curious what else Martha has come up with for the simple, amazing egg, here's a link for you. These are all so fun, I'm tempted to try blowing out some eggs next year, so we can actually display them and add to our collection year after year. Wouldn't that be cool?
As it is, we now have 18 hard-boiled eggs in the fridge. Frankly, I think that's awesome. Leah and I both love them, and Ben will eat the whites quite happily. Maybe I'll even try egg-salad sandwiches one of these days?
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Any favorite egg-dyeing memories or techniques? What do you do with them after they are all pretty?
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1 comment:
We dyed eggs during the Easter weekend since we always traveled to the g'parents for this holiday. But after seeing another friends blog about dying eggs early, I wonder why we haven't done this. So my goal is to dye early & with brown eggs. I'll have to see about the timing. And our eggs get made into egg salad, it's just so good, at least i think so!
Thanks for the new ideas for egg dying!
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