12 Creative ways to decorate your Easter Eggs
The eggs are in a large pot cooking away. Every year I buy 24 eggs, and every year a couple inevitably crack open the minute they hit the hot water. This time I set them out for a couple of hours so that they'd be room temperature, hoping that would help. A couple still managed to crack, somehow. No worries, that never stops us. We'll color them anyhow. My kids are traditionalists. Every year they insist I buy those inexpensive kits, you know the kind with the plastic cups and the little tablets of dye that, when placed in a water and vinegar solution, explode with color. When they were younger, watching the water magically turn to bright shades of gold, red, pink, blue, green and purple was half the fun. Over the years the prices of these kits have gone up, and gone are the plastic little cups. We instead use our own tea cups and glasses - which is in itself much better for watching the water turn colors and in creating a perfectly colored egg. Over the years, we've wrapped our eggs in string, rubber bands, tape and placed countless (much to my chagrin) stickers onto the shells. We've written secret messages in white crayon, only to be exposed when the egg has been colored. We've used the same crayons to create patterns and shapes on our eggs. We've tried tye-dying and all sorts of other - not always successful - ideas. We've colored white eggs and brown eggs and we always prefer the white ones.
I've curated a few ideas that we may or may not ultimately use. We'll cover up the dining room table with old stained and splattered upon table cloths and create our colors. There'll be messes and spills and thrills and when all the eggs are done we'll want to color more. I may break out the brown eggs - I usually do. Or we may simply call it a day and enjoy the beauty we've created. But we'll always say "We should do this again! Why do we only color eggs on Easter?" And I'll tell the children that we can do this any time they want, but for some reason we don't. I'm sure this year, after all our eggs and the table-cloth and the paper towels have all been colored, they'll say "We should do this again!" and I am sure I will tell them "We can do this anytime you want to." Because, really, there's no reason why we can't.