Jumbo Easter Egg Kids Craft Idea

Materials:

• 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.

Instructions:

1. 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:)
   
   
    
2. 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.
    
3. Bowls work great to hold the balloons while you apply paper mache.
    
4. 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.
   
   
    
5. Just start covering your balloons with one layer of glue and newspapers.
   
   
    
6. Try to keep newspaper strips as smooth as possible.
    
7. We let each layer dry over night.
   
   
    
8. We applied 3 coats of paper mache letting each coat dry overnight.
    
9. 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.
   
   
    
10. We let the dots dry about 15 minutes before flipping it over to complete.
     
11. I liked squeezing the paint on the egg and then using my foam brush to apply.
     
12. Next we painted an egg light blue and then Reece dabbed on some green speckles.
     
13. We also decide to make a striped egg.
     
14. Once all the eggs were painted and completely dry, I decided to add some water base varnish to make them a little bit shinier.