This is a wonderful project for three awesome reasons…
1. It is great to do with kids.
2. You don’t need a whole lot of supplies and what you do need doesn’t cost much.
3. The finished project is so fun to decorate with!
So gather your kiddos, gather your supplies and get ready to make some awesome jumbo paper mache eggs!
SUPPLIES…
Large balloons
Glue (for 5 jumbo eggs we went through 5 small bottles of Elmer’s glue)
Newspapers
Paint
OPTIONAL-glitter, why not? 🙂
paper trimmer- saves a lot of cutting time
Cut lots of strips of newspapers 1-2″ wide. You can see how the paper trimmer works great for this project! We cut 1-2 pages at a time that were folded and then just opened them up and tore in half.
Blow up your balloons. I actually like the eggs better when we didn’t blow them up to their full potential because as you will see with the yellow striped egg, it kind of lost it’s egg shape:)
Mix one bottle of glue with 1/3 cup warm water. Then dip each strip in the glue and rub any excess glue on the side of your bowl.
Bowls work great to hold the balloons while you apply paper mache.
Just a note…my daughter preferred to rub the balloon with glue and then lay a dry newspaper strip on the wet glue and then rubbed glue on the newspaper.
So whatever fits your fancy. Just start covering your balloons with one layer of glue and newspapers.
Try to keep newspaper strips as smooth as possible.
We let each layer dry over night.
Be sure to be silly and have fun as you go:)
Oh, and when kids aren’t looking you might want to try to smooth them out a little more:)
We applied 3 coats of paper mache letting each coat dry overnight.
Now to decorate!!!
FYI… We used foam and regular brushes to apply craft paint to our jumbo paper mache eggs, however, you could use spray paint. I pulled out my Kilz spray paint primer but it was too cold in the garage to spray the eggs. It worked out fine without the primer, however, if you are looking for perfect eggs 🙂 you won’t want to miss this step because you can see the newspaper print through two layers of the yellow and orange eggs.
Reece didn’t waste any time deciding how to decorate his first egg- Detroit Lions colors:)
Reece decided on silver pokadots on his bright blue egg so we found a clean sponge and traced a circle on it. I used my Keurig filter 🙂 It was just the right size.
We put some silver paint on a small disposable container lid with a lip. Reece dabbed the sponge in the paint, lightly scraped the excess off on the side, and then gently but firmly applied the dot to the egg:)
We let the dots dry about 15 minutes before flipping it over to complete.
I liked squeezing the paint on the egg and then using my foam brush to apply:)
Next we painted an egg light blue and then Reece dabbed on some green speckles.
We also decide to make a striped egg.
Once all the eggs were painted and completely dry, I decided to add some water base varnish to make them a little bit shinier.
On this orange egg, it might be hard to see, but Reece did add some lighter orange speckles to it. Then I added gold glitter to the wet varnish layer. I figured we had to have a golden egg!!! I also added a multi colored glitter to the wet varnish on the blue with green speckles egg.
So here they are! What fun:) We even made a trendy chevron design on our lumpiest 🙂 egg!
Then we poked them in among our decorations above the Entertainment center!
THIS FUN PROJECT WON RUNNER UP AT INSTRUCTABLES.COM!
YAHOO, THANKS INSTRUCTABLES!!!!!!!
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