Egg Painting

Mom's ceramic centerpiece

    In ninth grade I signed up for a personal typing class. And it was a great class – but it was only for one semester. I did not know what to fill that time with the second semester, and the choices came down to study hall or home ec. The lesser of those two evils was home ec.

      I don't recall too much about that class other than that we learned how to make starch ball Christmas tree ornaments – blow up a balloon and tie it, dip it in a starch solution and then wrap it with colored string; let the starch dry, pop the balloon, and what remained was a hollow sphere with a string coat – it was a neat activity at the time – I'm probably missing a step, because when I tried to do it with the girls years later, it did not work. And the unused starch is still in my laundry room!

      Another thing we learned was how to blow out Easter eggs – real, uncooked eggs emptied out – and then the shells are painted, and with care and luck, they can last for many Easter seasons! Over the years since then, I have blown out eggs from time to time. I don't do it artfully – some people can make the yolk come out intact through an itty bitty hole in the shell – I can make some of the egg white dribble out, and then after getting red in the face and dizzy from blowing, I'll put some kind of poker into the hole and break the yolk – and after more getting red in the face and dizzy – eventually the entire contents of the egg will have seeped out.

      After the first of the year each year I kind of tell myself that I'll blow out every egg I use for cooking or baking until just before Easter – and then I'll have a nice new batch of eggs to paint – but I haven't actually followed through and blown out any eggs probably since the late 90's when the girls would do them with me.

      Once the contents of the eggs are removed, there is the task of cleaning the inside so that nothing starts to grow and nothing starts to smell – rotten egg smell takes away from the beauty of a decorated shell real quick. I never found the directions for cleaning the inside of the egg to be adequate enough – often picking up a faint odor after a couple of days. Usually, I resorted to a little bleach – not enough to hurt the shell, but enough to clean out whatever might have been wanting to grow. Then I set the shells out to dry.

      There was one Christmas, in the midst of my Mom's ceramics and painting phase, that she brought unpainted ornaments to our house. The whole family sat around the kitchen table decorating the ornaments – many of which still adorn our tree every yuletide. I do have to admit here that I was not much fun during this event – just too fidgety to sit still and do the detail work – so mostly I watched while everyone else had a great bonding time with the paints and each other.

     And so there were leftover Christmas ceramics paints and the next spring, Sarah and Amanda used the paints to color the blown out Easter eggs – I think I might have even done one or two myself. The results were beautiful – and they still are. We gave some away, and the rest, we kept for ourselves!

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