How To Make Beautiful and Brilliant Gift Eggs

Welcome to one and all. Thank you for dropping in for a visit.

The last couple of days I’ve been working on restocking my (Easter) egg supply. I put Easter in parenthesis because, yes, I originally starting making them for Easter, however, I quickly moved on to making a decked out version for ‘Wedding Eggs’ or eggs that are an unusual and beautiful gift box.

These are an example of a pair of Wedding Eggs that I currently have listed in my shop. The eggs are made from those plain white plastic pull-apart eggs you can find around Easter – but that’s where the “plain” ends.

I sell these eggs in three styles: Jewel Toned, Pastel Eggs and Fancy Adorned Eggs. I recently sold out of my Jewel Toned eggs so the last couple of days I’ve been making a couple of dozen deeply hued Jewel Tone eggs, shown here in the bowl above. (For those of you who may be interested, I made a ‘how to’ on these eggs a couple of years back. Surf through my older posts to see those instructions.)

But here’s a little side story. In my Etsy shop Old Raven, I sell my handmade goodies and I also sell Vintage and Antique items which include a rare bit of jewelry now and then. Admittedly, when thrifting, a piece of jewelry really has to catch my eye for me to consider it for my shop because 1. Etsy is complete saturated with jewelry listings and 2. jewelry isn’t really my thing and I don’t know that much about it to buy with confidence. So when I do buy jewelry I always take it straight to my friendly jewelers to have them take a look at it and tell me exactly what it is that I’ve got in my latest ‘treasure’.

These folks are wonderful, they never charge me a dime for looking at these pieces and they’ve patiently added to my personal knowledge of the world of collectible jewelry and made it so I can list such items with honesty as to the quality and value of said piece.

And here’s the connection, while I was working on my eggs it occurred to me that many of the eggs I sell through my Etsy shop are going to adults who want to use them as not only gifts in themselves but as pretty containers to hold a special little gift. A pair of earrings for their bridesmaids. A string of pearls for the new mother-in-law. Cufflinks for the best man. Fun Easter eggs filled with chocolate kisses for every one in the office. A Valentine’s gift that holds a surprise of a lifetime.

So I thought, maybe my jewelers would like a dozen of my eggs to offer to their customers as unique little gift boxes for an amazing and glittering bauble they’re about to bestow on someone special.

But as I was making a spare dozen for the jewelers I thought I should add one or two of the ‘specialty’ bling eggs and that brings me to the heart of this post…I figured out how to color coordinate my rhinestones to the egg colors.

If you’re a crafter you’ve probably seen these packets of rhinestones that are already mounted onto a sticky tape and made into lovely flashy swirls. They come in lots of colors but you could spend a small fortune trying to collect them all and most certainly would not have the color you want when you need it. That’s why I stock up on the clear ones as they go with most anything.

They don’t look like much in the package but laying out on the table you can start to see some of the flash and bling these have.

I was working on a blue egg and was prepared to add the clear rhinestones when it occurred to me to wonder if the rhinestones would accept the alcohol inks like the plastic eggs do? Alcohol ink, in general, works on most things that are nonporous. So I gave it a try.

Yes, It worked! Typically, you use three or four different ink colors when coloring the eggs and I went with the darkest blue color in this grouping. The ink dries almost immediately so in just a minute I was able to start adding the newly colored rhinestones to my egg.

I love how this turned out…and remember, you can cut the strips of rhinestones to use selected sections from the overall design. I only colored one of the two flourishes on the sheet knowing I could easily color the other if I needed it.

This really opens up a whole new venue for personalization of these eggs. The color transition with the blues here are subtle and elegant.

Sometimes you might want the bling to be bold and totally different from the egg color, but I’m loving this delicate, rich, tone-on-tone enhancement.

Believe it or not, I don’t actually have all the colors Adirondack makes, either. But this is my selection of inks to play with and once I get started – an entire day can pass and I’ll look up from coloring eggs to find Rock’s home from work, it’s dinner time, I have inky fingers and a pile of gorgeous hand-painted eggs.

But there’s nothing like discovering a new technique to reinvigorate an ‘old’ craft. Some of these have the new colored rhinestones and some are using rhinestones ‘as is’ from the package. But isn’t that a pretty bowl full?

I do want to point out one more thing when making these rhinestone eggs. The rhinestones come on a sheet of clear acetate which is great because when you’re cutting them to go on an egg you can hold up the section to the egg to make sure it’s going to fit. You do not want to run across the line where the egg breaks apart with a tape strip or you’re going to have a disaster. Cut that tape line before or as you stick the line down and then reattach once you’re over the break. Never try to pull off the tape line once it’s on the egg – you’ll just end up pulling the ink off with the tape sticky.

If you like colored rhinestones in your crafting but are tired of trying to find the right color just buy a bunch of clear packs and make a custom fit.

I hope the jewelers like my gift for I surely appreciate all that they have done for me.

Thank you, as always, for joining me here. – Kriss

P.S. Happy Valentines Day !