Among other Chicken paraphernalia I can't seem to pass up I bought this egg basket eons and eons ago. No, I don't have any chickens (my city laws don't allow it, as well as the idea of ACTUALLY having them overwhelms me) but I am very much in love with the idea of chickens and eggs and all of that, so at the very least I needed to have my own egg basket, and I found this old girl at an antique sale for less than a dollar.
Now, because I keep my eggs (farm eggs though they may be) in the refrigerator, I don't in fact keep them in the egg basket. The egg basket for so long has sat sad and lonely, bereft of little white orbs.
I pondered getting some lovely wooden ones to use for decoration but the price tag on that was a little hefty for my liking. Instead I decided to play the patience game and wait for some of those little plastic ones that show up in every dollar store the day after the Valentines Merchandise is cleared out.
And here's what we did to make them lovely to hold and behold:
My lovely assistant filled them with barley so they would have a little weight and a nice little shaker inside just for the fun of it. (If we must have eggs, than it goes to reason we should try to have musical eggs)
then we covered them in white masking tape. First I taped around the opening line in the belly of the egg, then I cut the tape in short strips and just applied it all over the egg.
Meanwhile we had prepared a very simple Papier Mache' solution of flour and water. I took this recipe from Trish Kuffner's "Preschooler Busy Book":
Start with 1 cup of water and 1/4 cup flour-mixed.
Stir this mixture into 5 cups of lightly boiling water and let it boil for two or three minutes stirring gently.
let it sit to cool so it was comfortable to work with.
While our Papier Mache' was cooling we got to work ripping up strips of white tissue paper and paper sandwich bags.
I wanted my eggs to look as natural as possible, otherwise the sky is the limit for the fun bits of paper we could've covered our eggs in.
Then for the brown eggs, we soaked the brown paper right in our solution and laid them in strips all over the eggs letting them dry in between layers. When we were happy with their coverage, we laid them out on a T-towel to dry.
For the white eggs we simply covered our eggs in solution and then applied the tissue strips to the eggs smoothing them out as we went along. Sure it took quite a bit of tissue strips, but the wrinkly texture gives them a lot of interest and when they dried the colored egg underneath didn't show through at all.
Now, we have a lovely little basket of eggs that we keep on our table or nature table (even though technically, these weren't found in nature) and the kids love to shake them, hold them, juggle them and hide them all around the house.
I actually caught Ava Grace in the playroom with them all lined up by the toy organizer like a chicken coop, plucking them up from the imaginary straw and gathering them into her basket...
so maybe, we just might have another chicken girl on our hands...
I think this mama likes that.
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