About this time, it dawns on my family that Easter is around the corner. If it weren’t for tax season, we might notice it’s pending arrival sooner.
Usually my husband or I (typically not both) remember to actually buy an egg decorating kit before it’s too late.
This past weekend, my husband remembered Easter and purchased this egg decorating kit.
You’re staring at the crayon, aren’t you?
Let me give you a moment to let the artwork on the box soak in. As my Facebook friends were quick to note, there are several sexual innuendos displayed on this egg decorating kit.
Got your mind out of the gutter? Let’s move on to the contents of the box. Or maybe I should say lack of contents in the box. Because there were just six crayons and one inadequate crayon sharpener in the box. The “silly circles”, “egg stands” and “drying tray” are just part of the stupid box. The box you rip when you open, despite your most valiant efforts.
Now, if you are like me, you are used to actually dyeing eggs for Easter. You put those little colored tablets in cups of water and soak hard boiled eggs until they become the color you like. And then you decorate them with stickers or marker.
Not this PAAS decorating kit. Nope, this one requires you to shave wax crayons while you are boiling the eggs.
Go ahead and ask your kids if they are interested in shaving six colored crayons. If they say yes, see if they have any interest in doing it after about 30 seconds of shaving the first one.
G was a trooper and did a good amount of crayon shaving. Guess who did the rest?
My wrists and fingers hurt just looking at the above pictures.
At this point, we were too far into the project to abandon it. G and I agreed to give it a try, despite the annoyance of having to shave down six crayons and putting the colors into separate piles that looked far too small for 12 eggs.
Luckily, I read the package before I boiled the eggs – something my husband clearly didn’t do when he bought this “volcano eggsplosion” egg coloring kit – and knew we needed to have the wax shards ready before the eggs were done. We raced to finish our colorful crayon shaving piles because the next step required hot eggs.
During this time, Biz was running around the living room with vampire teeth in his mouth completely uninterested in decorating that didn’t involved dropping eggs into colored liquid. He was also alarmed when I took the pot of freshly boiled eggs into the dining room. (Clearly I was going to burn him with the hot water.)
And then we sprinkled shards of crayon wax onto the hot eggs I carefully placed onto the newspaper on our dining room table.
Sprinkling shards of colored wax on hot eggs is not as fun as it sounds.
The “eggsplosion” is supposed to come when the wax melts and the colors run together. The problem is that you really can’t move the egg around and adequately cover it with colored wax because you’ll pretty much just spread wax around and get the egg stuck to the newspaper.
Also, I was right that the amount of wax we ended up with really wasn’t enough for a dozen eggs. We ended up seeing a lot of white and not a whole lot of the “eggsplosion” the package illustrates.
Our final waxed eggs. They look slightly better in the basket. Emphasis on slightly.
My boys weren’t impressed that the dried eggs were “bumpy” due to the wax.
I may end up having to buy another kit this week so the boys can enjoy the traditional way of decorating Easter eggs. Plus, our eggs look pretty sad.
To me, this PAAS Volcano Eggsplosion decorating kit seemed like a bad DIY Easter egg decorating craft you’d find on Pinterest, packaged in a box.
What about you? Does this project seem like fun to you or are you good with dyeing eggs the traditional way?
