Eggperiment

I was reading one of the blogs I follow last week and this really crafty lady (Knit and Tonic) posted an Easter egg dying technique I had never heard of, it sounded fun and different so the kids and I decided to give it a try.

I think she called them tie dyed eggs. So I started with a quick trip to the Salvation Army store to see if I could find 4-5 funky silk ties. (they must be silk) and a plain white T-shirt I could cut up. $20 bucks later I had eggsactly what I needed for the project.

I used a seam ripper to open the ties up and I ironed them out real quick to the kids could get a good look at them laying out flat.

I always give each kid 6 eggs to dye so I cut 18 squares (they need to big enough to wrap around an egg) out of the t-shirt and I had the kids kids come into the kitchen to do the rest of the work.

They cut up the ties into pieces to wrap the eggs with. I am glad I did not cut all the ties up for them because as they got more and more creative they would use pieces from several of the ties for one egg. They used rubber bands to secure the silk ties around the eggs.

Next you wrap the silk wrapped egg in a square of the white cotton t-shirt and wrap tightly with a rubber band.

Unless you are Q and then you spend most of the craft time playing with the rubber bands rather than wrapping the eggs. Who cares, he was having tons of fun and is thrilled at how his eggs came out. He did do some of the eggs and helped me pick out what he thought should be wrapped around the eggs.

Next you add water and some vinegar and let them cook away on the stove top for about 25 minutes, give take a few in this house.

We let them cool and then unwrapped them:

They came out pretty cool. I noticed that not all the ties transferred the dye in the same way. I had one Armani striped tie and it did not work as well as the cheaper/tackier ties (I paid a big $2.99 for that one, I thought that was quite a lot for a sacrificial lamb) For some reason the Disney tie with the 7 Dwarfs on it transferred all the colour except for the black, so you can't really tell what image we were trying to transfer, but we did end up with cool colours. The floral tie transferred really well.

We had a great time doing the craft and the kids are in love with the eggs. I will be keeping my out over the coming year for cool ties to use for next year.