Tutorial: Tissue Paper Decoupaged Easter Eggs

I love that every year we decorate a few more of our monstrous hoard of wooden and cardboard Easter eggs. I bought soooo many of these years and years ago, when the little kid was a tiny toddler and I decided that we'd start celebrating Easter (I think I decide to celebrate a holiday guided only by its awesome craft project potentiality). Plastic eggs offend me, and I think I was experimenting with veganism or something similar then, so hard-boiled eggs weren't an option.

Anyway, those eggs turned out to be a great purchase, as we've loved them ever since. One year we decorated some with Sharpies, another year we painted them with acrylics, another year we made mosaics on them, one year I felted colorful wool around some of them, and still every year when I bring out the stash, there are more plain ones to inspire us.

Last week, encouraged by how nicely the tissue paper decoupaged bookshelf turned out, the kids and I tried the same tissue paper decoupage technique on some of these wooden and cardboard eggs (the wooden eggs all came from Casey's Wood Products, and the cardboard eggs came from either a thrift shop or a garage sale--I can't remember now, but it was an excellent score). I set out a dish of Mod Podge, paintbrushes, tissue paper, and the eggs, and the kids and I listened to Jesus Christ Superstar while painting a patch of egg with glue, layering tissue paper over it, and then painting another layer of glue over the tissue paper:

On the one hand, this is a fiddly project because the tissue paper is thin and easily torn, and you have to be very mindful about where you put your hands while working so that you don't mess up a section that you've already completed, but on the other hand, fiddly projects teach perseverance and problem-solving, and anything that you mess up is repaired in seconds with just another layer of tissue paper.

The finished Easter eggs didn't look anything like I'd imagined they would, and at first I wasn't sure that I liked them, but the kids loved them from the second that they were done, and now they've grown on me, too.

The kids used up the last two giant eggs in our stash on this project (one of which had some toddler Sharpie scribbles on it--ah, the memories!), so next year I may actually need to buy more wooden eggs. Six years between egg purchases is pretty darn good!

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