Year 2 Easter Eggs Week 3 – Food Coloring and Foil Leaf

Ok, so this was really week 2. The natural dyes were week 3. I’m a hot mess most of the time. (Why is the mess hot? What kind of mess are we talking about? Seriously, where did we get this saying from? Personally, I got it from my manager when I worked at Michael’s 7 years ago…sorry) Anyway, like I said earlier, my son only started sleeping semi-decently a couple months ago and two months away from being 2, so counting late stage pregnancy issues, two full years of sleep deprivation on top of employment upheaval and financial stress and the resulting multi-cause exhaustion eating away at my cognitive capacity. Be grateful my children are fed, clothed, and we all make it to work/school/church relatively on time, everything else is a bonus.

Week 2, the week before the natural dyes and plant relief, we played around with food coloring and a foil leaf, gold/silver/copper.

The food coloring produced beautifully brilliant eggs and is the only method to produce as even a color distribution as Paas.

The three on the left are hers, the three on the right are mine. Don’t remember what I was going for with the grey one, but I still like the way it turned out.

To add dimension this week, we applied foil leaf to our eggs with foam paint brushes and Modge Podge.

The blue one is my intentionaly global-esque egg. My daughter “banded” her pink and orange eggs on different axis, and went for a random approach with the teal one.

This was a bit tricky and I don’t think my daughter enjoyed it at all. I was trying to save money and bought the package that had all three metals mixed together in flake form. I think she probably would have been all right with the sheets that you then rub off in places for the mottled look. The flakes didn’t like to stay where you put them. They’d either slide around in too much glue or stick to your finger or the applicator and reject the egg altogether. In the end, we persevered and figured it out with some gorgeous results, though.

P.S. If you know a better way to apply foil leaf and can point out how we made it more difficult for ourselves than necessary, please, by all means, enlighten me. Seriously, any of my posts that you can point out short cuts or improvements to, please please please make suggestions.