On Friday, I took a few minutes out of the day to make my Easter eggs for this year. Now, last year, I made a whole bunch of different kinds of Easter eggs, including these yarn-wrapped ones:

These book-page-paper-mache ones:

And these real, blown ones, used to make a garland.

I still have all of those, so it’s arguable that I didn’t need to make any new eggs to decorate with this year. And, since our kitchen is all torn up for the remodel, I wasn’t sure I would even decorate this year.

But then I spotted this awesome idea at Wal-Mart and had to do something with them.

Yup, those are plastic decorating eggs, as in you can dye them with regular Easter egg dye kits but they won’t spoil or break. Amazing right? …not to mention cheaper than buying real eggs.

Of course, I’ll probably still make some real eggs for Easter this year, but these are nice because I can save them and not have to worry about breaking them…which happens, I know from reading about it online…not from personal experience or anything…

I bought three packs of the plastic eggs, and stuck a few plain white ones in little vases on the mantle as is. The others I either painted or dyed, in a subtle, natural color scheme that I thought would be lovely and sweet and timeless, so I can use them again and again.

For starters, I grabbed two shades of test pot paint stashed in the basement and painted half the eggs a light blue color. I used two slightly different shades to add some variety but it’s a little hard to tell the difference in these photos.

I originally tried to dye these blue using vinegar and food coloring. But it was going to be really, really light…as in, still white.

I’m pretty sure these plastic eggs would work better if you used a real dye kit or recipe. I was just guessing and clearly didn’t have a strong enough mixture. So, in the end, I went with painting, letting them dry spread out on an old actual egg carton. It took two coats to cover them nicely with smudges or fingerprints.

Then, I made a batch of coffee, dumped it in a bowl with some vinegar and soaked my remaining eggs for several minutes until they turned a nice light brown color. I’d guess I soaked these for about 30 minutes total.

I was surprised to see how well the color took using this method considering my bad luck with the blue, but I guess that’s the great thing about coffee…it’s a natural dye, or at least, in this case it was. After letting those dry for awhile, I started with phase two for this project, the speckling.

I knew I wanted to try and speckle the eggs after seeing a few lovely examples in stores but shying away from the higher prices of those factory painted ones. So, I took some basic brown craft paint and thinned it with a little water to make my speckling mixture. It needs to be really runny for this to work.

Then, I used my finger and a paintbrush to flick paint splatters on the eggs.

It’s a messy project, so protect any nearby surfaces you don’t want to get speckled. And be prepared to have a slightly stained finger for a day or so.

You’ll have to turn the eggs a few times to get all the sides speckled evenly.

Then, it was time to let them dry completely. A few hours later, I had these lovely, natural looking Easter eggs to add to my collection.

I think they turned out really well for a last minute project that only took a couple hours.

I’ll be back tomorrow to show you how the rest of our Easter decorations turned out. In the meantime, tell me if you’ve ever seen this fake eggs before. I thought it was a brilliant idea! And, how do you decorate Easter eggs, if at all?