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.
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.
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