Personalised easter eggs

Every year I like to try something different on the egg decorating front. Last year we used round stickers that were peeled off after dying to create polkadot eggs.  This year, though, I was feeling the need for a natural, Autumnal palette. And, as usual, I was also feeling the need for personalisation.

These eggs were relatively simple to make but I had a number of false starts with stamping the names on. On the first few both the normal and permanent inks I tried bled quite badly and just refused to dry with the result that they smudged with irritating ease. A few eggs bit the dust today for smudge crimes.  But don’t fret, they deserved it.  They were bad eggs.

So I came up with the idea of coating each lightly with Mod Podge before I began and that helped a lot.

Here’s Sophia’s.

Here’s the step-by-step:

1. Blow your eggs. Right, my fingers are literally itching but I am going to leave that alone and move on.  Golf clap, please.

2. Coat your eggs with a light coat of matte Mod Podge and allow them to dry for 20 minutes or so.  The Mod Podge step is important because otherwise I found the ink not only bled but wouldn’t dry – even after time in the oven.

3. Using a normal ink pad (I didn’t have much luck with the permanent inks drying well) gently stamp your name or indeed any phrase that takes your fancy. It helps to roll your stamps gently across the curvature of the egg rather than just using a straight up and down movement.

4. Place the eggs in a low oven for at least 30 minutes.  It took quite a long time for my ink to dry properly.

5. Remove from the oven, allow them to cool. Be careful – they may still smudge a little.  Smudgy little rascals they are. To put an end to it once and for all you could give them a spray coat of varnish. I wouldn’t brush Mod Podge over for fear of, yep you guessed it, smudging them!

6. Tie a bow around them.  In keeping with my recent penchant for browny, natural hues I used some off-cuts from a gorgeous chocolate plaid fabric I bought last week.  It has that vaguely woolly texture which gives it lovely frays and stray pulled threads.

If I have time I would like to make some more of these eggs with more generic sayings like “peace” and “life” and “He’s baaaaaack”.

Also, don’t you think these would be just gorgeous as gifts if you personalised them and then filled them with chocolate using this method.

The other Easter “craft” we like to do every year is decorating biscuits.  In fact we do this for pretty much every holiday.  This year we used those squeezy icing pens and cachous. This is Sophia’s Humpty Dumpty bic. Well, he’s the King of all eggs really, isn’t he? Can you dig his bow-tie?

I want to wish all of you, my lovely readers, a very safe and happy Easter filled with obscene amounts of chocolate.  Or wine.  Or whatever floats your boat resurrection-wise.  Just be safe and happy.