Hand-Painted Easter Eggs - Wooden Craft Project

I made something for our little fella again, and this was such a fun project I wanted to share it.

I had been thinking of getting him a set of plain wooden eggs for a couple months, since he loves the plastic egg set one of his grandmothers gave us. It is pretty neat, featuring different shapes and colors inside the egg halves which challenge him to match them up. They are great, but they are plastic, and as I've previously blogged, I challenge myself to limit our plastic toy exposure. With that said, I am pretty sure we still wouldn't get rid of the plastic eggs unless we had a wooden version of the same sort. They're just too cool.

So, new eggs! I looked on Etsy (my go-to for a hand-crafted toy store) and found that the plain eggs were $18/6 eggs. I didn't want to pay that much. :/

Then recently I found six eggs for $5 in a craft store and I totally bought them. I was thrilled. I'm not sure what they're made of, but I know it would be hard for him to really gnaw on the egg shape, so I don't feel too worried about splinters, etc.

I found another blog where someone painted her eggs and then coated them with food-grade polish, and I set out to do the same.

I mixed some food coloring with a few drops of water and used a paint brush to apply blue and green to the first two eggs. They looked atrocious. They were stripey from the machining that made them round, and spotted from blemishes from poor packaging. I realized I'd have to add a step and sand all the eggs before I proceeded.

If you're going to do this, I highly recommend doing a little sanding first.

Then, painting the color on is fairly easy- I just applied it liberally and allover the egg, smoothing the color on and watching absorb, then applying more until I liked the color.

They looked great!