still covered in glue

last night i suddenly realized that easter is in two weeks and my house is not one bit decorated! so i dug out last year's crazy ridiculous glitter eggs (which fueled my hatred for martha) and displayed them happily in their bird cage. i continued to shake my fist at martha as glitter fell everywhere and then decided they weren't quite enough decor.

my mother in law recently suggested i try decorating some eggs and add them to my shop. i'm obviously much too late for this easter but hopefully by next easter i'll have perfected a technique or two and be able to list some eggs!

i had eggs left from last year as well as some plastic eggs & a bag of tiny paper mache eggs that i bought this year so i pulled out the mod podge, some paper, fabric and assorted other madness  i have a few dictionary pages (ok...hundreds...maybe thousands?) left from the crazy book project as well as the innards of some freshly chopped up books that will soon become purses and i thought some book page eggs would be fun! 

a few hours, lots of mod podge and many ripped up pieces of paper later we have a fun little bowl of eggs:

 i have determined a few things about this project and i will share them with you. 

first: the little plastic eggs that split open should only be used with a thick covering. see the green polka dot egg? that one was mod podged fabric (so fun) but you can see the line. so for fabric and thin paper only use paper mache eggs. 

second: if using a rectangle of some sort (paper, fabric, book) to cove the egg the measurements will frustrate you. going around the egg is easy but accounting for the tapered top and bottom was more difficult. i cut slits so that i could fold the pieces in - instead of mashing them down and promising bubbles. this worked well except then there was too much paper/fabric at the tip of the egg. i kept going back and forth between not covering the tip and creating a point with too much material. perhaps the solution is to cut every other strip a bit shorter. we shall see.

last: the wrapped eggs were the most fun to make because i didn't have to think them as much, but they're time consuming. i did a tiny one with hemp i use for jewelry, a large one with some pretty substantial jute and the two green ones are strips of fabric. one is folder to give it a nice edge, the other is just frayed madness. 

one more note: all paper eggs were done with matte mod podge, as were the fabric eggs. for the hemp and jute i used good ol' aleene's tacky glue. 

sorry for the lack of pictures- one is the best i could do while covered in glue at midnight! i'll be trying more of these soon so stay tuned!