Thursday 14 April 2011

Easter egg fun - empty eggshells!

The kids and I decided to do some easter crafts today. We really wanted to use some empty eggshells, both to decorate and hang from an easter tree, like this one at Attic 24, and to paint faces on and fill with cress seeds to make cress heads . Well, the cress heads can be done with scooped out boiled eggs, so that's no problem, but for the painted eggs, we need empty but complete shells. To do this, you have to blow the eggs out. How do we do such a thing? First, you need an egg and a sharp needle... Use the needle to gently poke a small hole in the top and in the bottom of the egg. Wiggle the needle from side to side to make the hole slightly bigger, and jab the needle around inside the egg a few times to break up the yolk...
Hold the egg over a bowl and blow gently into the top hole, so that the egg comes out of the bottom hole. This action will make your kids giggle about how the egg looks like it's peeing! You'll end up with a nice bowl of scrambly egg, stay tuned for ideas on how to use this in delicious recipes...
You'll end up with a nice empty egg with little holes in it...
Fill a jug or bowl with water and some kind of sterilising solution, you could use a few drops of bleach, I used sterilising tablets. Hold the eggs in the water until they fill up, this sterilises the inside of the shell. If you're impatient, like me, you could suck the water into the egg until it's almost full (but not completely, you don't want a mouthful of bleach!).
Leave for a few hours, then blow out the water and dry the egg. Ta da! Nice empty eggshells for painting. We're going to tie string into ours once they're painted and hang them up. the kids had a ball!

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