Egg-cellent

Good morning!  Today is bittersweet since it's my last day of spring break (I never count weekends because, duh, I get those off anyways) and I recently purchased a new blog template that's not downloading correctly.  Grr.  However, I did complete a Pinterest project that I'd been wanting to tackle.  It originally came from Alissa over at A Crafty Endeavor

(Please excuse the poor quality of the pictures.  Eric has the camera in his flight bag, so these are straight from my phone.)

Yarn Easter Egg Project

Materials needed:

• 1 bag of globe/water sized balloons
• 1 cup of liquid starch ( I used Sta Flo, which I found next to the detergents)
• 1/2 cup of flour
• Various colors of yarn or embroidery floss (I used yarn)

Step 1: Blow up as many balloons as you're planning to use.  I did quite a few more than I actually ended up using. 

Step 2: Mix your 1 cup of liquid starch and 1/2 cup of flour.  Make sure you combine it well enough to get the flour lumps nice and smooth because they will dry as lumps on your Easter egg.

Step 3: Cut your strings so you have approximately 3 arm lengths (I count both arms) per string.  It's easier to have them pre-cut so you're not constantly stopping to wash your gooey hands.  You also might want to prep your assembly line for making and drying.  It worked well for me to step up my strings, goo bowl, balloons, and various cutting boards for drying. 

Step 4:  Take one piece of string and coil it into your goo bowl.  This will prevent the string from getting too tangled.  Make sure that you press the string into the goo so it will stick to the balloon.

Step 5: Wrap the gooey string around your balloon.  I found that the closer you wrap the strings next to each other, the longer it takes to dry and the harder it is to get excess goo off the balloon. 

Step 6: Wipe off any excess goo with a paper towel.  You don't want too much of it to dry on the egg because it's visible and difficult to get off after it's dried.

Step 7: Set aside to dry and repeat steps 4-6 until you're finished.  I used all of my goo mixture and got about 9-10 water balloon-sized balloons.  My kitty knocked one off the counter and ruined it.  Silly kitty.  (And yes, I forgot to take a picture of the drying process.)  Oops.

My balloons had to dry overnight.  (Some of the balloons that I had over-wrapped were still a little sticky.)  Use a pin to pop the balloon and pull it out of your larger gaps. 

Overall, I thought they turned out super cute! 

Things I'm keeping in mind for next time (oh yes, I'm gearing up to do this with some of my students) would be: don't wrap the string too closely and make sure not to leave too much goo on the balloon as it drys.