Decorating Eggs with Kitchen ItemsDecorating Eggs with Kitchen Items With or without packaged dye, food coloring or natural dyes on the shells, you can also decorate eggs with things you probably have in your kitchen. Try some of these ideas:
1. Use clear-drying, nontoxic, white glue to glue on different colors of dry (not cooked) rice, such as white, brown or wild rice; or small pasta shapes, such as alphabet letters, elbows, orzo (rice-shaped pasta) or shells. Or use dry beans – any kind, such as black, kidney, navy, pinto or red beans; dry split peas or lentils; or unpopped popcorn kernels. You can use a small brush to spread the glue on the egg or squeeze the glue right out of the bottle to make a design. Use tweezers to make it easier to pick up small shapes. Press the shapes gently into the glue. For rice (and other very small shapes, like orzo), pour the rice into a bowl and simply roll the glued egg in it. Work on one small section of the egg at a time, about 1/4 of the egg at the most. Then, turn the egg and work on another section. When the design is done, let the glue dry. An egg carton is a handy place to put drying eggs. (If you’ve used a lot of glue, it might take up to 2 hours for the eggs to dry.) When the glue is totally dry, if you want, use spray paint to make the design any color of the rainbow you like. You can even make golden eggs! Just remember that spray-painted eggs aren’t for eating.
2. Make designs on your eggs with spices, seeds or grains. You can glue on cloves or Chinese five-star spice, colorful dried red peppers or crinkly whole peppercorns or any kind of seed from big sunflower seeds to tiny pale sesame or black poppy seeds to make a face or a flower. Mixed birdseed is inexpensive and has lots of different shapes and colors in it. For interesting grains, you might try barley, couscous, cracked wheat, wheatberries or oats. If you don’t want to make a design using different colors, eggs made with all one kind of spice, seed or grain are pretty, too. Make these eggs just like the eggs in kitchen idea number 1. Put all the eggs in a basket or bowl for a table decoration.
3. Arrange herb leaves and edible flowers on the shell and glue them down in a pretty pattern. Or, hold the leaves tightly against the eggshell and put the shell into one leg of a clean pair of nylon hose. Pull gently to tighten the nylon against the eggshell. Tie the ends of the nylon with twist ties. Then dip the egg (in the nylon) in food coloring or another dye mixed with water. Let the egg completely dry before you take it out of the nylon. The egg will be dyed all over except for where the leaves were. This is called resist dyeing. |
