Sarah Jane's Craft Blog

Some people dye real eggs every Easter, I dye plastic ones. I have tried most methods of putting alcohol ink on plastic Easter eggs . So this year, I opted to just play around with a paint brush and see what happened. I laid down my craft mat and a few plastic Easter eggs. I opted to use Piñata inks for this project because they are highly saturated in color and run less than other inks. I used some cheap synthetic paint brushes and a plastic palette for the inks. I opened the eggs so they could rest on their flat open surface. Then I just painted on color. I found it worked best to cover the egg in a wash of color (which goes a bit faster if you drop a couple of drips of rubbing alcohol into the ink) and then ad other colors over top to create patterns. To give you an idea of how the original egg color affects inking, I spread the same color (blue violet) onto a blue and light green egg. You can see that the color looks very different. I used the larger flat brush to rotate simil...

For the last several years, I've tried out various different methods of decorating plastic Easter eggs . I buy them on clearance after the holiday, so I usually have a stash in my Easter box. I have mod podged and spray painted and inked them . This year, I decided to try using alcohol ink on eggs that have been spray painted white. It can be tricky to find the inexpensive plastic Easter eggs in white--they usually come in a variety of pastel shades. Alcohol ink is so much brighter and vibrant when it's on a nice light background. So I grabbed a can of  glossy white spray paint and put some plastic eggs in a cardboard box and attempted to spray paint them. It took several coats with them opened up, then I put them back together and put them into an egg carton and tried to spray paint the sides. They are tricky to paint just because of their shape. I ended up with some paint issues (spots where they touched and some pealing, etc...), so I tried another batch, so I had more o...

I have a bit of a history with plastic Easter eggs on the blog. I've drip inked , splatter inked , and stamped them . I've spray painted  and mod podged and even turned them into a wreath . So I was a bit stumped about what I was going to do this year. But then it occurred to me, I hadn't plastic wrapped them yet. It's my current favorite method of inking , so I'm trying it out on all kinds of surfaces. So I got out a craft mat and my inks . I also grabbed some plastic wrap and a selection of pastel plastic Easter eggs. I usually buy these after Easter when they are dirt cheap so I can keep making fun stuff with them. There were a couple bags in my Easter box and I grabbed one of each color to start off. I tore off a small piece of plastic wrap and selected colors I thought would work well with the base color of the Easter egg. This first one was pink, so I used a couple shades of red/pink and some blue and yellow as contrast. I set my egg on t...

A few weeks ago, I went to the Goodwill Outlet and picked up a cart full of stuff. One of the things I picked up was a package of large (like about 4 inches tall) iridescent plastic Easter Eggs. They were pretty and light (it's pay by weight at the Goodwill Outlet), so I tossed them in the cart. After getting home and taking a closer look at them, I knew I wanted to ink them. Since Easter eggs are usually used to hide treats, these don't do a very good job of that. Some ink would make them more colorful and perhaps hide contents. I had used alcohol ink on plastic Easter eggs in the past (both stamped and blown ), so I knew inking would work, but I had never worked with these iridescent eggs before. After looking at the eggs, I decided that inking the inside would be a better choice. The shimmery coating was on the outside of the eggs and if I inked over it, it would probably be less shimmery. I started by opening the eggs up and giving them a color ...

A while back, I dyed some plastic Easter eggs with the traditional alcohol ink stamping method. When I found a few white eggs in a set of pastel plastic Easter eggs, I knew I needed to revisit the process for even crisper colors. This time, though, I tried a different method: canned air. The egg halves are pretty light and it's nearly impossible to ink them put together as an egg. So I inked them in their halves and used a bamboo skewer through the holes in the eggs to hold them in place. I dripped some ink onto the eggs and then used the canned air to spread it out. It's pretty simple. The only thing you have to watch out for the ink mixing and getting brown. It's especially problematic along the connection half line. Otherwise layer colors and blow it around until you like the way it looks. I tried to use the same colors on the top and bottom halves of the eggs so they'd match up and then set them aside to dry. In the end, they...

6 years ago I made a wreath out of plastic Easter Eggs . It was one of my first in depth projects I posted on the blog. I was super pleased with how it turned out since it was made out of old plastic eggs and Easter grass that I just had laying around, but it looked brand new. Every year since then I have dutifully hung my egg wreath on the door each Easter season. This year, I discovered that the wreath had fallen off of the shelf (it probably got bumped when getting out Christmas decorations) and broke. Two eggs fell off and a few got broken when it fell on the concrete basement floor. One of the broken eggs I was able to find a matching egg in my stash and simply swapped out the top halves. I added a little extra glue to it just in case it didn't fit perfectly together. The other egg--the purple one, I couldn't find a matching half for, but I did find a few eggs that were pretty much the same color. The top half of the egg wouldn't fit on the old bott...

Over the last couple of weeks I have been digging into my stash of plastic Easter eggs to jazz them up. I used washi tape and decoupaged Easter napkins  to decorate the eggs, but this week, I decided to break out the spray paint. And, arguably, I think this project turned out the best of all of my plastic Easter egg projects this year. I grabbed a cardboard box and split the eggs open so they would lay flat and not roll around in the box. I started out with a teal spray paint ( Rustoleum's Lagoon ).  I made a few quick swipes across the eggs and then let it dry for a few minutes. Next I grabbed a purple spray paint ( Krylon Plum ) and followed up with a Blue ( Krylon True Blue ). I knew I didn't want complete coverage of any one of the colors, so I painted in stripes and zig zags across the eggs trying to cover the plastic underneath, but not the other colors of paint. I finished it off with some silver spray paint ( Rustoleum Metallic Silver ) tha...