Happy First Day of Spring! Dying Easter eggs is one of my all time favorite spring activities, and since Easter is so early this year we decided to head over to my cute friend Kellie’s house this weekend and color some pretty eggs.

I think the thing I love the most about dying eggs is that there are soooo many ways to make absolutely stunning designs. I usually try to go all out with the fanciest pinterest ideas I can find (what can I say, I’m a total sucker for that stuff!) but then I get sucked in for hours trying to create the “perfect” egg, not to mention I get really grouchy if anyone tries to join in and mess it up… Please, someone tell me they understand acting that crazy?! Am I the only one??  And as we were prepping our bowls with dye, my three year old got this wild excitement in her eyes, and I realized that this shouldn’t be about me creating the perfect egg, I wanted it to be about her having fun and creating her own little masterpieces. (Look at that, life lessons embedded in regular old activities!)

So, with that decision in mind, we started mixing up some dye and I let her have at it! There are a couple of different techniques we used do fun designs, and even though it was messy and my daughter’s methods were much less conventional than mine (props to her for thinking outside the box), I love how perfectly imperfect they came out! Here are some of the techniques we included :

-Marble Technique Eggs:

I added about a tablespoon of vegetable oil to the dye, then right before dropping an egg in mixed vigorously to combine it as much as possible. Once you put the egg in you have to keep stirring it up a bit so that the dye and oil creates the cool marble effect on the egg.

-Blotting Technique on Eggs:

This one I came across accidentally as I pulled an egg out of the dye and tried to wipe it off with a paper towel, and accidentally used a section of the towel I had used on another egg, so the dye transferred slightly. You can use this to “drybrush” dye onto the egg, or dab off dye in some spots so there are patche of lighter and darker color on the egg.

-Glitter Eggs:

Because no holiday is complete without glitter, am I right? 🙂 I actually just used a tiny sponge (a piece of a paper towel would also work) then spread some glue (elmer’s glue or similar is fine) over the entire surface of the egg. Then throw the egg in a wax bag with a small pinch (or giant handful, I don’t judge) of glitter and shake it up.

-Ombre Eggs:

The key to ombre is PATIENCE. For mine, You start with the lightest color and dip the egg (or dunk the whole egg) into the dye. Then, using one of those wire egg things or just your fingers if you don’t mind the mess, take the egg and hold it partially in the dye to make it darker on that section. Then slowly pull it out section by section, so at the end one portion is darker than the other. I used light yellow as my base, then used red to dye small sections slightly darker than the last section.