Coolest Easter Eggs EVER...

This is what I did last night instead of fighting the insomnia. For some of you, this will be a great, therapeutic way to get rid of your ex’s old ties. I am lucky in that my mom collects silk ties and makes amazing things out of them, so when I ran across these instructions, I knew just where to go.

I’ve got some thoughts and hints on how to do this well that aren’t in the original instructions, so if you want to die Easter Eggs to look like this:

Then click through for more!

First off, I take no credit for this. I’m going to send you off to Best Bites to check out their process — here’s the blog entry, and here’s the printable instructions.

Now.

If you have visions of spending quality time with your five year old making amazing Easter Eggs with this process,  you are delusional or don’t actually have kids.  It took me a good hour and a half to prep the eggs for boiling, what with cutting the ties, carefully wrapping the eggs and tying them tight, cutting up the pillow case, carefully wrapping and tying the eggs a second time…

So here are the things I learned that aren’t in the original instructions:

• Don’t skimp on the material. Cut a generous swath of tie to cover your egg.
• Pay attention to how you wrap your egg, and make sure that the fabric is actually touching the egg as much as possible, especially at the top where you gather the fabric together.
• Work on the table, not over it. I dropped four eggs. Blech.
• You can’t tie the fabric too tightly. This is what pulls it taut enough to touch the surface of the egg.
• When  you gather the fabric up to tie it, fold it up, not by the corners, but by the long sides, smoothing the fabric onto the surface of the egg and folding the corners in and upward to gather it all together.
• Realize that it’s an experimental process, and not all ties are going to work for this process. I had one red tie that didn’t transfer dye at all. None of  my green ties worked the way I had assumed they would — they all gave me blue eggs. Apparently, yellow’s not a great dye for this process… go figure. And the dramatic black and grey tie I selected turned into the delicate, robin’s egg blue pattern you see in the main picture, bottom right.
• You don’t have to let them cool slowly. Go ahead and run them in cool water. You know you can’t wait to unwrap them, anyway.