Easter Eggs

I was on Pinterest (of course) and came across this tutorial for some super cute Easter eggs. I'm slowly but surely building up my repertoire of holiday decor, and when it comes to Easter I've got nothing. So I attacked this project. Her tutorial is helpful, but I think I came up with a pretty efficient way of assembling them. Also, I made my eggs a little different than she did. You can adapt it however you want, but this is how I did it.

Cute, right? My photography is a little lacking, so I apologize for that. The pictures are good enough to figure out what I'm doing, though, and that's what is important.

First of all, buy some paper mache eggs from the lobby of hobbies (Hobby Lobby). These are not found in the Easter section--they're with the rest of the paper mache stuff. That's right, they have a paper mache section. I had no idea. It's by the wood craft stuff. There are three sizes of eggs. I got only the big and middle size, and that's what is shown above. I put the paint bottle in there so you can sort of gauge how big they are. They're pretty cheap. The big ones were $1.59 and the middle size was $.67. You could use the small ones too, but I didn't want to. All paper mache was 30% off when I got it, so that was a bonus.

First of all, paint the eggs with a color that goes with the paper you've chosen. I only painted one coat because I planned to pin the flowers on pretty tightly, but if you want to do it less tightly I'd paint two coats. I don't have a huge collection of acrylic paint, so I had to buy the colors I needed at Hobby Lobby. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Anita brand is only about 70 cents. Every other kind I've seen around seemed to be $1.30 or so. Win!

Oh yes, while you're at Hobby Lobby you can get paper too. Unless you're the sort that keeps a stash of scrapbook paper. Scrapbook paper was 40% off when I bought it at Hobby Lobby. Win again! I used two different paper patterns per egg and it took a total of two 12x12 scrapbook papers to do a big egg (one page of each pattern). It took about half that much to make the medium sized egg. I did it really tight, though, so it would take less if you space it further apart. Keep in mind that both solids and patterns look cute (although I'd pair a busy pattern with something more solid). I used the striped paper on top of the above paper pile along with hot pink for the complete egg at the beginning of this post, and I love how it turned out. I was nervous that the stripes would look weird, but definitely not. Be bold.

I suppose you could cut out the flowers by hand... but that would take sooooooooo long. Get a flower shaped paper punch. It's worth it, especially if you want to make a bunch. Mine is the medium size. I bought mine at Joanne's for $6.99 (it was 40% off! I'm just a winner all around!). You can get it at Hobby Lobby for $9.99 and Michaels for $7.99 (or maybe $8.99... they were all sold out so I didn't pay too close attention to the price). I didn't see any at Walmart. Yes, I looked at all of these stores before purchasing one. I'm thrifty like that.

My punch came with a little compartment to catch the flowers in. However, I wanted to punch my flowers as tightly as possible on my paper, so I chose to hold the punch like so. Thus, I could see exactly what I was punching.

I caught my flowers in a tupperware container instead. You can see how tightly I tried to punch it. If you choose to pack your flowers on your egg tightly like I did, it really doesn't matter if you have the occasional oddly shaped flower. If you have slightly not enough paper to make a perfect flower, punch it anyway. It's not noticeable. If all of your flowers are weird looking it might be noticeable, but the occasional ugly one isn't going to ruin it.

After you punch a whole row of flowers it's necessary to trim the extra off like so. These odd edges make getting the punch on the paper a little difficult, but you can do it. I believe in you.

The way the other tutorial carried out this part seemed kind of inefficient. I lost my patience very quickly with her method. First of all, find some cardboard. I used the box from my husband's diploma frame. We love this box. We do puzzles on this box, play cards on this box, and now I've made eggs on this box. You don't have to find a diploma frame box. You just need something cardboard that you can hammer pins into. I'll explain the method later, but just keep this in mind. The beautiful thing about my box is that it's really big and only about 2 inches thick. It's also very sturdy. Sturdiness is important. If you don't have a box as ideal as mine, you can just layer some cardboard thick enough so that you don't hammer pins into your kitchen table. Anyway, on your cardboard place some bottom flowers color-side-up. I chose a light blue. You can do as many at a time as you'd like; it doesn't really matter. I started out doing only 10 or so at a time, but by the end I was laying out 30 flowers to pin at a time.

After that, place your other flavor of flower on top of your bottom petal like so. This is a good time to mention that you need some pins. Now, the other tutorial says to use the pearl topped pins. This makes it pretty dang adorable. However, at Walmart, these only come in a box of 100 for $2.97. And she said it took a whole box to make one egg. That seems $$$ to me. I opted for something more economic: a 450 count box of normal satin pins for $2.37. Yes. 60 cents cheaper, but 350 more pins. Perfect. They aren't quite as cute as the pearls... but still cute. It's shiny. What more could you ask for? One box got me through 2 big eggs and 1 and 1/4 medium eggs. Not bad!

Hammer a pin into each flower. You only have to hammer them in a little bit, as you can see from the picture. You could try to just push them in... but it's really ouchy on your fingers. Use the hammer. The beauty of this method is that when you pull the pin out of the cardboard, it takes the flowers with them. That way you're ready and rearing to put them on your egg.

Now hammer them in there. You can see how tightly I arranged them. There's really no wrong way to put your flowers on your egg, but I'd suggest doing the ends last (especially the smallest end very last). I worried my plain Jane pins would look slightly tacky, but I ended up really liking the result. I like the simplicity of the little silver dots. And if you cross your eyes a little bit, my eggs almost look diamond studded. Haha. Ok, not really.

With how tightly I've got the flowers you'd think this took forever. Not really. It took me maybe 10 minutes to punch and pin this many flowers on the blue egg. If you want, you can punch all the flowers at once before starting any pinning, or you can punch 20 or so flowers, pin them, then punch some more. I tried it both ways and I think they're equally fast.

That's how it's done!