Turning an Eggshell into an Ornament

 Here is part two of the Egg Ornament explanation.  Because I have started collecting up supplies to make beaded push pin ornaments, I have some gear specifically designed for jewelry making or beading projects.  These things are not necessary, but they do make things a lot easier.  The main one here is a bead design board.  This keeps your beads sorted and stops them from running around on you.  You can find these at craft stores but there are many different layouts.  I found a layout I thought would be useful to me on Amazon.  Amazon also has more affordable choices than my local craft store did.  I chose this 3 pack of bead design mats.  

The time consuming part of any bead project is the design.  I went through all of my parts and pieces and assembled an example of the top of the ornament and the bottom of the ornament.  Then I laid out the pieces in order in the wells of my design mat.  I use pins or short pieces of wire and stud earring backers to put working examples of the designs together for visual reference as I work.

I can hold them up to the egg and visualize what it will look like before I string it together.

Above photo is the top and below photo is the bottom.  The fancy cap with the diamonds below can be found on Etsy.  Flower Bead Cap

Once I have decided on the layout, I set out my beads, keeping the finished examples handy.

(that black square on the mat is a stick on magnet for holding pins)

Next you need to straighten out some wire.  I leave the wire on the coil until I am done and then cut the ornament off of the coil.  This gives me something to hang onto and avoids wasting wire.  But it is a personal choice.  You can cut a length of wire to work with instead.  You would need a piece at least six inches long and you will have some waste that way.

Now you need to get your wire through your egg from hole to hole.  This is easier than you would think even with the little tiny holes of the bead caps.  Make sure there is a clean cut and no burr on the end of your wire. First place your top pieces on the wire in correct order.  Pass the wire through the hole on the small end of the egg.  Hold the egg up with the wire and twirl it around.  As long as your wire is mostly straight and has no burr, the wire will find the hole within a minute.  Trust the process....  it will go through....

Now add the pieces to the bottom end

If you push them all together you can see what your finished ornament will look like.

Now you have to crimp the bottom end.  I've done this two different ways.  In my first attempts I just added a clear bead to the bottom.  

And then used my round nose pliers to make a very tight loop and the end of the wire.

This will stop your bead from coming off the end and looks OK.

I thought there must be other ways and I found a crimp bead that I tried while making these examples.  These just arrived today so this is the sum total of my experience with them.  They are supposedly designed for both wire and thread.  I hope they are easier to use on thread because they are NOT easy to apply to wire.

This is how they work.

Well... they finish the wire beautifully but they are a pain in the ass.  First off, while you are working with them you need to turn a hook in the end of your wire so the crimp bead does not go flying off.  You can snip that off once you get the crimp closed.  IF you get the crimp closed.

Firstly, these little boogers are next to impossible to get ahold of and I can't see how they would be any easier to get ahold of on thread than on wire.  You need a very flat surfaced plier like a needle nosed plier and once you get ahold of it in the right direction, closing it down on wire instead of nylon thread takes a lot of pressure.  A lot.  But once you get it crimped down it looks very nice and holds securely.  It looks just like a 3mm gold bead.

Now the only thing left to do is put a loop on the top to attach an ornament hook.

This is what it looks like expanded.

You want to leave a little wiggle room in the wire.  If you crank down on it too hard, you will crack the egg and the whole thing will be ruined.  I put a needle nose plier above the top bead and bend the wire 90 degrees.

There is a little length left in the wire from top to bottom so there is no hard pressure on the egg.  You will use that short section of wire to wrap your tail around.

Now use the round nose pliers (needle nose would work you just won't get a neat circle) to wrap the wire in a loop.  This is where I find that the rest of the coil of wire comes in handy.  You can get a good grip on the wire.  All you really need is about two inches extra so you may prefer to work with a length of wire instead of the whole coil.

And make at least one wrap around the neck.  The more wraps I make, the messier it looks so I only go once around.  Now this is only my twelfth attempt.  It would be a skill that improves over time.  There are YouTube videos by jewelry makers that are very helpful.

Now cut the wire off close to the wrap and add the ornament hanger of your choice.  Since I had wire and pliers, I fashioned one of my own.

And that's it.  Once you get your design set and your beads laid out, you could string an ornament together in a matter of minutes.  I figured I could do one in about three minutes but I ended up wasting ten minutes fiddling around trying to get those crimp beads placed right in the needle nosed pliers.  Finishing the end with a bead and a loop takes all of ten seconds.  So are the crimps worth it?  No.

          

Since these big green eggs were experimental for the blog, I think I'll keep experimenting and add some gold paint.  Actually, first I'll experiment on the breakfast eggs ad if those look nice, then I'll tackle painting these ornaments.

Prepping Eggs for Ornament Crafts

 When I posted about using jewelry components to create ornaments out of blown out eggs, there was a little interest in duplicating these so I will share what I did and what I've learned.  You can start working on these for next Christmas, or aim towards the upcoming Easter holiday.  Easter Egg ornaments to hang on a flowered branch could be fun to make.  I left my eggs natural but I've thought of decorating them with gold painted designs, and if you were doing them for Easter, you could dye them.

I'm going to divide this into two posts because it is very photo intensive.  The first post is going to be about gathering supplies and prepping the eggs.  This is the time consuming part.  Unless you want to waste a lot of eggs, you are going to want to blow them out over time as you use them. And shopping for jewelry components can take as long as you want it to because the choices are endless.   I found two nicely matched green eggs to use for this blog and I blew them out as part of the three eggs I needed to make a batch of cupcakes.  So here we go!

Above are the tools and supplies you will need.  Some of these things, particularly the wire and the pliers can be purchased at brick and mortar craft stores like Michaels or small businesses on Etsy.  I have given links to Amazon products because they are the easiest to get ahold of and affordable.  When you start shopping on Etsy, there are so many options that you spend a lot of time finding stores that have all or most of your products to combine shipping.  I combined my Etsy purchases with supplies for other ornament projects, but if you use the terminology in the Amazon listings you can shop for yourself on Etsy and filter by things that are shipping from the US.  Beads and jewelry findings are generally sourced from China and India to begin with but at least you can find small businesses in the US that have already done the importing and many of those also sell vintage overstocks they have collected over time.

Wire 

Round Nose Pliers

Pearl Beads 6mm, 8mm and 10mm

Glass Spacer Beads size 6/0

Small End Caps (Bead Caps)

Large End Caps (Flower End Caps) - may not be necessary if you can use smaller caps for the wide end

There are a lot of videos on You Tube that will show you how to blow out eggs.  This is the one that I think is the most straight forward.  There are also some good videos out there on making egg ornaments.  I'm just going to tell you how I made mine.  Since then I have thought of several variations that would work, but let's keep this simple.

There are two things you can do at the beginning that will make your completed ornament look like it was crafted by an artisan instead of a grade schooler.  

• Get your egg holes lined up so that the egg hangs straight when you are finished.
• Make your caps and wire fairly tight so that the beads to not look loose.

To get your wire turned into a hanger at the top you will need those round nose jewelry pliers (you could probably get by with good needle nose) and to line up your holes you will need to measure somehow. You could use a fabric tape measure, but a tip from a push pin ornament maker is to cut strips of paper, fold it in half and use the folds to line up the top and bottom.

here is a link to a YouTube  demonstration of the measuring technique.  Explanation starts at timestamp 2:06.  Once you have folded the strip of paper in half, use a push pin or awl to make a hole in the paper to center your measurement with your first hole.

You are going to have to carefully eyeball the first hole as a starting point.  I worked on the narrow end of the egg, using a pencil to mark what looked like the center.  You can move your dot and erase until you are committed to the location.  

The best tool I've found to get through the shell is a push pin because it is very sharp, short and controllable.  You will have to pick at the edge of the hole a little until it is about the diameter of a #2 pencil lead.  This is the end you will be blowing on.

Once you have the first hole made you are going to center your strip of paper on it,  Use the push pin to index the hole in the paper strip over the hole in the shell.

Even the paper strip out on the egg so it is circling the egg at the longitudinal "equator".  Pinch the paper as close to what you believe is the center of the wide end of the egg and cut the paper between your fingers and the shell.

Now you have a gap in the strip at the center of the wide end to make a pencil mark.  You can remove the paper strip and refold it to see if you have made the ends equal.  You now have a custom tape measure that you can place on the egg in several directions to better judge the center of the wide end and make a pencil mark.

Now you need to make a hole large enough to blow the egg contents through.  

You can see that the holes will have created cracks and compromised the shell's structural integrity.  We are going to solve this with glue and bead caps.  Use a bowl to catch the egg white and go ahead and blow with a drinking straw against the smaller hole until you egg innards are out.  You will need a long corsage pin or wire or awl to scramble and further liquify the white and yolk. Rinse the egg as well as you can and set it aside for a day or two to dry well.

Those cracks will only get worse over time if we don't stabilize them now.

If you want to paint or dye your eggs, this would be the stage to put on at least the base color.  Now we need to glue the bead caps on each end of the egg centered over the pip holes.  This is important for three reasons.  

• Centering a fine wire on the axis of the larger holes lets the ornament hang straight.
• Stop the wire from tearing away at the edge of the holes making them larger.
• Stabilizing the shell so the fine cracks do not spread causing the egg to crack wide open.

To do this I chose Elmer's clear glue.  It is easy to work with, dries clear and can be wiped off easily.  While you will not be able to see the glue under the gold cap, this is something I imagine will yellow over time just like old Scotch tape, so you don't want to get it all over and you don't want it oozing out from under the edges too much.  It is water soluble and you can clean it easily with a damp cloth.  You want to put enough glue on to make sure the cap seats well in it.  Don't worry if you get it over the pip hole because you can easily break through the glue when it dries with a pin or the wire.

I used a corsage pin to make sure the cap was centered over the hole.  I used an earring back run part way up the pin as a stopper so I could put pressure on these small caps without getting my fingers in the glue.  Later I added white rice to these custard cups so I could stand the egg up straight in them.  If you don't have actual egg cups you can use any small dish full of rice or even salt or sugar or and empty egg carton.  I used rice because it is easier to pour back into a jar unlike salt or sugar that seems to end up everywhere.  This became important when centering the cap on the wide end because the egg was flatter and gravity caused the cap to want to slide off of to the side before the glue dried.

Push the cap firmly into the glue

Allow the glue to dry for a few hours before you work on the other end.

The bead cap shown is an 11mm cap

The wider end with the large flower cap requires more fuss.  You want to shape the cap to fit the egg so it looks well fitted and professionally done.  You could use a smaller size bead cap.  I chose these larger 27mm flowers because they were easy to mold to the shape of the egg and they covered the larger end holes.  Remember I started this project with old egg ornaments that had sustained a fair amount of wear and tear and I wanted a cap that would sort of wrap around and grip the end of the egg to provide structural stability as well as be more decorative and visible from the side view.  If you start with a smaller hole, you could certainly use a smaller cap such as a 10 or 11mm size which is contained in the first smaller sized assortment from Amazon .

To shape these I started with a hard plastic Easter Egg from a craft store that I had in my seasonal decor.  You could probably use a whole fresh egg that was intact and not blown out.  Another idea is a darning egg if you have one of those.  You don't want to work on your blown eggs because undue pressure is just going to spread any hairline cracks you have created when making the holes.

Yep, a darning egg is what really worked best.

You can fuss with these for awhile. Remember the tighter the flower conforms to the egg, the nicer it will look in the end.   I used a needle nose plier to flatten the petals.  I shaped it for quite awhile, trying it on the ornament egg many times before I was satisfied. 

Once you are happy with the shape of the cap, you need to study each egg to see how well you have lined up your holes.  There is some adjustment available in the large hole of the wide end.  I found that a long straight "stem wire" from the floral department worked best.  I had an old package lying around.  You could also probably use a corsage pin.

I used enough glue to get under each petal and adhere them to the shell.  I pressed the cap in a smooshed it around a bit and then put it back on the floral wire to scrutinize it.

I applied the glue in a flower petal pattern

When I was happy with the placement I stuck it back in the custard cup, settling it straight in the rice and double checking with the corsage pin to make sure the cap hole is over the egg hole enough to get a wire through.

Now you wait for them to dry completely and you will be ready to add the center hanging wire and beaded ornamentation.  I'll show you how I did that next week.

As I write this blog, most of us east of the Mississippi (and you guys in Texas) are in the middle of a substantial winter storm.  My Kentucky cousins are hoping for enough snow to go sledding and the South Carolina cousins are hoping it moves north fast enough to save them from freezing rain.   Up here in New York it is still business as usual.  It has been and will be particularly cold but we are expecting a fairly normal amount of snowfall.  The snow from this storm is Gulf moisture coming up through the Ohio Valley instead of over the Great Lakes.  In fact Lake Erie, always the last lake to freeze over, is finally reaching a level of ice coverage which should put an end to the heavy lake effect snows for the season.  

Stay warm!

Bitter Cold

 It has been single digits now two mornings in a row.  I have been busying myself with indoor projects so that winter hasn't bothered me much, but it sure would be nice to go for a walk in the garden.  So let's do that.

It will soon be time to order online plants to get the best selections.  I already have my lists made out but it is good to refresh my memory about a few projects and additions so I don't get off track when I see all of the new and beautiful varieties for 2026.  Besides my annuals, and a few perennial additions, I plan on putting a rainbow of Bearded Irises along the walkway towards the neighbors.  They will not ship until late summer, but I have spent a lot of time sorting through the options and I want to get my selections locked in before everyone else does.