This Is How You Hand-paint Wooden Easter Eggs

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World!

These hand-painted Easter eggs are just as fun as the plastic ones–but they’re beautiful enough to keep forever!

It can feel almost impossible to avoid plastic Easter eggs. They’re cheap, they’re pretty, you can put treats in them, and they are EVERYWHERE. I don’t have a blanket hate for plastic eggs–I'm happy enough to thrift them!–but the world does not need more brand-new plastic *anything*, and there are so many other meaningful, eco-friendly options that are just as fun and a LOT more beautiful.

Such as wooden Easter eggs!

Some of the wooden eggs in my current Easter stash are a full 15 years old, and those eggs painted with the little-kid techniques of my then 5- and 7-year-olds are honestly even more precious to me now than their more recent creations of galaxy, Captain America, and shark-themed eggs.

Whether you’re a little kid or all grown up, the technique for hand-painting wooden Easter eggs is super accessible. Here’s all you need, and how to do it!

Materials

• wooden Easter eggs. I’ve always bought all of my unfinished wooden eggs from Casey’s Wood Products in Maine. If you check out their online store at just the right time, you can even get lucky and find second-quality wooden eggs for cheaper.
• primer. This is an important first step in painting unfinished wooden eggs. Any kind of primer will work, as long as it can be used on wood. I often use the same Zinsser that I use for my walls, but I also really like Rustoleum’s Paint+Primer spray paint when I want a base coat that’s not white.
• paint. Again, nearly any kind will work! I use primarily acrylics, as oil-based paint is a Whole Other Thing that I have no desire to mess with. House paint works great, especially the little 8-ounce samples that you’ve definitely got on hand if you dither as much about wall colors as I do. Craft acrylics and artist’s acrylics are both terrific, and paint pens are indispensable for detail work.
• paintbrushes.
• (optional) sealant. If you’ve got polyurethane sealant on hand, it’s perfect for making these painted wooden eggs shiny and impervious to damage. Mod Podge is less resistant to damage, but also works. But if you don’t mind eggs that aren’t shiny, acrylic paint doesn’t actually need to be sealed. Sealing the egg also means that you can’t repaint it later, and a LOT of my stash of wooden eggs have been painted and repainted and repainted again. Not every wooden egg painted by a 10-year-old has to treasured forever, ahem!

Step 1: Prime the unfinished wooden eggs.

This is a simple first step that will keep your beautiful hand-painted embellishments from soaking into the wood.

Using the primer of your choosing, give each egg one or two coats, then let it cure for the time recommended on the primer’s packaging.

I keep a lot of paint on hand, so my favorite time-saving technique for these eggs is to use a spray paint plus primer to give the eggs their primer and their base coat simultaneously. This is perfect for my galaxy eggs, for instance, which are black with galaxy embellishments, and my Captain America egg, which is mostly red. If you plan to paint wooden eggs as a family or kid activity, it can also be nice to start off with eggs base-coated in a variety of colors. It’s a fun little boost to creativity!

Step 2: Paint the wooden eggs.

This is where you can really let your creativity prevail! There is no limit to how you can paint an Easter egg, whether it’s abstract or hyper-realistic. I’ve got all kinds of abstract Easter eggs, several galaxy ones, two that look like the Jaws movie poster, one for every Avenger, more rainbow eggs than you’d believe, and as of this Easter, one wooden egg painted for each of my kid’s colleges, already tucked into their Easter-themed care packages (along with these treat-filled paper Easter eggs!) and wending their way across the country to them.

It’s a matter of personal preference, but I really like to use house paint or craft paint for larger areas, artist’s acrylics for more detailed areas, and paint pens for the tiniest, most specific, or most accurate details. You can add infinite layers and additional details as long as you let the layer beneath dry first. Use masking tape or stickers as stencils or to tape off areas, and make your own templates by drawing very lightly with pencil directly onto the surface of the egg.

When you’re finished, don’t forget to sign your artwork!

Step 3 (optional): Seal the finished Easter egg.

The only tricky part about polyurethaning or Mod Podging these Easter eggs is that you have to let the paint fully cure first, then let the sealant fully cure again before the finished Easter eggs are ready to roll. In a pinch, I’ve been known to collect up all our newly-painted eggs after Easter and polyurethane them before putting them away for the season.

These wooden Easter eggs are sturdy enough to last for an entire childhood’s worth of Easter egg hunts, and after that, you’ll love seeing them on display. I’ve got my favorites of our painted eggs sitting on my coffee table in my kids’ childhood Easter baskets, and I’ve only cried a few times looking at them.

Summer break can’t come soon enough for me!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

I Still Hate George Rogers Clark, But Vincennes Has Two Native American Mounds, Only One Of Which I'd Seen Before

Also, Mr. Craft Knife knew I was lonely for my kids and there's nothing that will cheer me up like a national park passport stamp.

And it doesn't hurt that I'm desperate to watch Project Hail Mary on IMAX but we're listening to the book on CD first, and a day trip is a great way to bust through a good three CDs!

So, off to Vincennes!

I've only been to Vincennes, and the George Rogers Clark National Historical Park, once before, on a family day trip way back when the kids were ten and twelve and we were studying the American Revolution. I was in a phase of trying to turn composition books into single-subject journals in which the kids could take notes and record their thoughts and paste documents and write essays. We could then keep the notebooks, and every time we returned to that same subject, the kids could use them for review and then add all their new information. I still think this is an AMAZING idea, but the kids never stopped being horrified by it, so eventually I gave up.

And that's why they now don't remember all their states and capitals or all the original 13 colonies!

Anyway, I was still very much insisting on American Revolution notebooks during this homeschool field trip, and I'm so happy I did (and a little bummed at myself for not holding the line forever) when I can pull out gems like this, written by the older kid as a travel journal entry after this trip:

This was also the day that I discovered that my 10-year-old could correctly utilize scare quotes!

It's been just almost ten years since that trip, and nothing has changed. The older kid still thinks that all money would best be served by being given to her, the younger kid still strongly emits in every encounter the sentiment implied by scare quotes, and the George Rogers Clark Memorial still sits on top of the site that used to be Fort Sackville:

OT, but why am I genuinely channeling my Pappa in this photo, with my hands shoved into my pockets and my phone on prominent display in the cargo pocket equivalent of a cellphone holster? All I need is a couple of handfuls of coins and keys to jingle.

Random gossip: back in the 1930s, when plans for this building were being made and bids were being taken for the work, the limestone lobby and the granite lobby got into a big fight. The limestone lobby was all, "Yo, The building should obviously be made from Indiana limestone, because INDIANA. Granite isn't even FROM here!"

And then the granite lobby was all, "Yeah, that's awesome if you want your whole building to look like a weathered old gravestone in 30 years. You know what DOESN'T literally dissolve in the rain? GRANITE."

Ultimately, it was decided to do the outside parts in granite and the inside parts in limestone, but then someone found out that the granite they were planning to use was being sourced from Canada (gasp!), and both the limestone lobby AND the granite lobby freaked out. 

Don't worry, y'all. They eventually found enough US granite to complete the project and peace was restored.

I know the people of the early 1900s were allllllll about their huge granite memorials (see: Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park), but I far prefer the historical recreation school of thought (see Fort Necessity National Battlefield). Instead of a huge monument right where Fort Sackville used to be, wouldn't you prefer a life-sized recreation of Fort Sackville? 

At least they can't take away the river across which Clark and his "army" (lol, that kid!) sneaked... although they CAN channelize it, it seems!

There's not much of a riparian buffer zone on the east bank, but regular flooding is more historically accurate, I guess:

We walked across the bridge to get a landscape view of the site. There also used to be a French village in the area, but I'm not sure where:

You can kind of imagine a fort right where that big granite monument is!

This is my partner, who literally DROVE US HERE, being disturbingly surprised that we're at the edge of the state:

I was all, "Well, we drove southwest until we got to the Wabash River. What did you think was going to be on the other side?"

He replied, "Um... more Indiana?"

Come on, Dude! The Wabash River is the state river of Indiana! It marks the the southwest border of the state almost all the way up to Terre Haute, and then somehow manages to wrap around Indiana and end up on the other side of the state in Ohio! There have been songs written about it and how it's literally right here! One of those songs is literally the Indiana state song!

Ten years ago, I would have smugly informed him that he was welcome to join our homeschool anytime. On this day, however, I had to just let a smug look suffice.

This church isn't original to the site, but the cemetery is, and it's the site of the original church:

I feel a lot of sympathy for the French citizens of the original town, who probably spent all day, every day, swearing allegiance back and forth to whoever had happened to wrest temporary control over the fort next door.

I don't feel any sympathy for any widower who names his dead wife as his "consort" on her tombstone:

It's apparently just the term they used on a headstone when the wife predeceased the husband, but you and I both know good and well that's so the dude could marry again five minutes later and not have to worry about a whole string of "wife" headstones tagging along behind him. You only get to be his "wife" when he dies first, because that's the only way you wouldn't get supplanted!

This headstone, however, is lovely:

You do have to ignore the apostrophe error, though. I'm too lazy to look up when punctuation was completely standardized, but I'm pretty confident this would have always been wrong. It's a plural, not a possessive!

To the memorial!

I don't know if y'all know about my lord and savior Baumgartner Restoration, but his videos are AMAZING and will cause you to become weirdly invested in art restoration, to such an extent that when you walk into a building and see old-looking art, you'll ask the nearest park ranger about what restoration looks like for that art.

And then he'll tell you, because park rangers are also amazing!

I learned that these are not actually murals, but canvases painted in a warehouse and then installed here using marouflage. The park ranger even pointed out a couple of place where you could see some wrinkling where the canvas hadn't adhered smoothly. He also mentioned this canvas that had been revised, because from the viewing angle it originally looked like that one prone soldier on the right was aiming at George Rogers Clark, lol!

The park ranger and I yapped so much that this poor dude eventually had to sit down and dissociate, lol:

He got his revenge, though, because later he left me standing by the bathrooms, wondering where on earth he was, while he'd actually wandered off to have a whole entire conversation about these Art Deco bronze embellishments with that same park ranger!

How do you end up with the Zodiac on an American Revolution memorial?

Art Deco!

My absolute favorite component is the corn:

I also like George Rogers Clark, his nose polished because that's where everyone touches him:

Fun fact: the memorial is literally falling apart, with the original bronze doors collapsing and the skylight starting to fall in and leaks from all over during every rain. There's no way to get the money to repair it, though, because Trump cut funding to the national parks. Who needs to preserve our national legacy when we can instead have a dictator's private army of jackbooted thugs committing human rights violations on our streets? 

At this point, I need to tell you that other than the Jackbooted Thug in Chief, Mr. Craft Knife and I are the dumbest fucks on the planet. To reiterate, this is the George Rogers Clark memorial:

There's a set of steps to get into the inside, and then a covered area all the way around that colonnade, and then another paved area below that enclosed by that middle wall. The bottom wall just has landscaping inside of it. 

To our credit(?), each of these areas is expansive, and it's unclear--if you're a dumb fuck, at least!--where any additional points of egress might be.

So when Mr. Craft Knife and I, busily yapping our heads off to each other, left the building, walked down a set of steps, and turned right, we found ourselves walking around the entire building via that colonnade. We kept expecting there would be another set of steps down, but nope! We walked around, spying the visitor center we wanted to go to in the distance, continued around, admired the river, and eventually circled back to the first set of stairs we saw, which we now noticed continued down another flight.

"Lol, us!" we said, walked down that flight of stairs, and turned right to go to the visitor center.

It wasn't until we saw--and then passed--it in the distance that we realized we were on that paved area below the memorial that was also elevated and walled off. But surely there would be another set of stairs HERE! Nope! There goes the river for the second time! Hello again, statue of Francis Vigo, namesake of Vigo County!

Eventually we reached, yes, that exact same set of stairs again, and noticed that oh, right, it continues down ANOTHER FUCKING FLIGHT.

Finally, we managed to conquer the world's easiest escape room, and could go get my passport stamp!

That's 34 down, and 399 to go!

Burrito and margarita break:

Now, onto the mounds!

There's a lot of conflicting information about Sugarloaf Mound and Pyramid Mound, and it's not immediately clear what information is authoritative. This webpage, for instance, names Pyramid Mound but has photos and driving direction for Sugarloaf Mound, making it unclear which mound the descriptions refer to. The Wikipedia page for Pyramid Mound also shows photos of Sugarloaf Mound. The Megalithic Portal site has accurate info on its page about Sugarloaf Mound, but its page about Pyramid Mound... also shows an image of Sugarloaf Mound, sigh.

Here's what's written about Sugarloaf Mound in the 1911 History of Old Vincennes:

Fortunately, a study of Sugar Loaf Mound was done in 1998. It found that Sugar Loaf Mound is natural--it's essentially a sand dune formed from all the silt/loess blowing around after the glaciers receded. The "red altar clays" are a misidentification, but there was significant human activity on the mound, as this study found human bones and chert in the core samples. The author theorizes that the mound was used as a "cemetery" by the Late Woodland peoples. The Woodlands people just loved burying each other on top of nice knolls! This article said they'd sometimes build artificial burial mounds, too, but those were pretty small--what they really liked is a nice, tall mound that was already there for them. So now I'm wondering if they'd also take advantage of the super old Mound Builder-era mounds and also pop some of their corpses in. Or maybe they thought that these mounds WERE from the Mound Builder era, since they look so similar!

You certainly can't beat the view from the top:

...and of course I've got my hands in my pockets again:

I made my partner walk alll the way down by himself so he could take a photo of me looking tiny at the top. It's not every day that you get to stand on top of a mound!

Just between us, it's a little less exciting when it's not an earthwork that was built by the ancient peoples, but if they thought it was special, then so do I.

Although the author of "The Geomorphology of Sugar Loaf Mound" didn't also sample Pyramid Mound, he theorizes that it's also natural, since it has the same shape and is in a similar geographic situation that could have resulted in the same type of dune formation. A previous excavation of that mound uncovered more human burials and a piece of the fancy Yankeetown pottery. This sign said that the human remains were repatriated but the pottery lives at Grouseland, the historic home of that asshole William Henry Harrison.

Notice the signage is explicitly calling the mound natural, but as far as I know that hasn't been directly ascertained through core samples or other excavations. But I do think that 1998 Stafford study made a convincing argument!

I've been avoiding paying admission to that bag of dicks' house because I hate him, but I guess now I'll have to!

The whole area of Pyramid Mound is really overgrown, and you probably wouldn't be able to hike it much further into Spring without getting mobbed by ticks:

There's a line of little blue utility flags, though, that mark a trail towards the top, and as you walk it, you can--again, at least this early in the Spring--make out the profile of the mound:

The top of the mound is very overgrown with old trees, but there are also a lot of divots dug deep into the mound, making me wonder if sometimes people sneak up here and do some pothunting:

Sugarloaf Mound is straight ahead in the below photo, and it's actually pretty close. Without the trees in the way, you might even be able to see it from here:

And here's... Jesus Christ, I've got my hand in my pocket AGAIN. I guess my Pappa was really with me that day! 

That's kind of funny, because Pappa would have HAAATED a day trip to mosey around American Revolution crap and big piles of dirt. HIS Special Interest was the Wild West!

P.S. Want more obsessively-compiled lists of resources and activities for geology buffs, history nerds, and lovers of handicrafts? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

DIY Treat-Filled Paper Easter Eggs To Send To Your Daughters in College

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

These treat-filled paper Easter eggs are a low-waste way to celebrate!

Of COURSE I still make my college kids Easter baskets! I mean, they may be away at school and having grown-up adventures, but they still like candy and LEGOs!

However, while even plastic Easter eggs are okay for a kid’s Easter basket, since they’re used year after year, I can’t get behind mailing high-waste holiday packaging to someone living in a dorm room. I don’t want to spend the money and space mailing it, and my kids don’t want to figure out what to do with it after the two seconds it takes to open it and eat the candy.

My favorite solution? Upcycled and easily recyclable PAPER!!!

It comes entirely from my stash (which means it’s something I’m actively trying to get rid of, ahem–recovering craft supply hoarder checking in!), it’s lightweight and easy to mail, and the kids can pop it into the recycling, sans guilt.

Here’s what you’ll need to craft your own treat-filled, guilt-free, easily recyclable paper Easter eggs:

Materials

• paper. The papers I upcycled for this project are pretty enough to be Easter eggs, but it honestly doesn’t even matter if they’re ugly because the important part is the candy! I used old scrapbook paper and vintage wallpaper samples, but I also had some old sheet music that I was eyeing. Book pages would be cute, or if you’ve got little kids at home, put them to work coloring in some Easter egg designs onto white paper.
• candy. Choose something that won’t get stale, if you’re also putting these into a care package. Jellybeans are a good choice, although just between us, I didn’t really like the ones you can see in the photos. I thought they’d taste like gummy clusters, darn it! Starburst jellybeans forever!
• needle and thread. I used my sewing machine for all the stitching in this project, but it could also easily be hand-stitched. A running stitch would work great!

Step 1: Trace an Easter egg template.

You can of course hand-draw an Easter egg template, but I generally just do a Google Image search. Place a piece of white paper directly onto the screen over the image you’d like to trace, and then trace it in pencil. Don’t use a pen or marker, no matter what, because we don’t want marker on our computer screens!

The template I’m using in this project is 5″ long, which is just the right size to comfortably hold 20 jellybeans. If you want to put in a different amount of treats, size up or down accordingly.

Step 2: Cut two paper Easter egg pieces per Easter egg.

Trace your template onto paper, then cut two paper Easter eggs for each finished Easter egg that you want to have.

The image above contains some Easter eggs made of scrapbook paper and some of vintage wallpaper samples.

Step 3: Sew the eggs almost all the way around.

If you’re sewing this on a machine, switch to an older needle since sewing through paper doesn’t do a sewing machine needle any favors. Set your machine to its longest straight stitch. If you’re hand-sewing, any thread works, but embroidery floss is very pretty!

Put the two Easter egg pieces together PRETTY SIDES OUT! I forgot to do this once and was very annoyed at myself, grr.

Start near the end of one of the longer sides, then sew a scant 1/4″ stitch about 75% of the way around the egg. Don’t backstitch at the start or end of your stitch line, since in my experience this tends to tear, or at least wrinkle, the paper.

Stop your line of stitching near the top of that same long edge where you started, giving yourself plenty of room to fill the Easter egg with treats. Again, don’t backstitch, but instead just gently remove the Easter egg from the machine.

Step 4: Fill the Easter egg with treats.

The stitched ends that make the opening will be a little unstable without the backstitching, so just be mindful as you gently open up the Easter egg and fill it with candies. There’s enough candy inside when the Easter egg looks full but you can still put the paper back together at the opening neatly. If the Easter egg is overstuffed, the paper will overlap unevenly, so just take candy out piece by piece until the opening is smooth.

Step 5: Finish sewing the Easter egg closed.

Carefully put the two pieces of Easter egg back together evenly, then finish sewing it closed. You’ll reinforce those unstable thread ends by starting your stitching several stitches before the opening, and ending it several stitches after the opening.

Your paper Easter eggs are now so pretty, and they hold so many nice treats!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!