Good Friday Egg Coloring

hEvery year on Good Friday, my mom has a party to dye eggs at her house. Friends, neighbors, and family come together with several dozen eggs and color tablets. Everyone has their own methods to coloring eggs. Some people use a wax crayon to draw designs, some people dip half the egg in one color and half in another for a striped effect; this year we even threw vinyl tape into the mix, creating colorful patterns (thank you Martha Stewart!)

Jonah paints them. Last year, I had given him real eggs to paint. Of course they ended up getting cracked (pulverized is more like it!) in the process, but he had fun. This year, I found some wooden eggs at Hobby Lobby, on sale for about $2.50 for eight eggs. I let Jonah choose two colors of paint for each egg. I put some of the paint on a paper plate (I would have used a pie tin, but paper plates were what we had available- pie tins are reusable for other art projects!) and gave Jonah the egg. I let him discover his own ways of applying the paint.

He enjoyed dipping the eggs into the paint

using his fingers to smear the paint

rolling them on the plate

and when I gave him two eggs he even used one egg to apply paint to the other!

When he was finished, I had some decorative eggs to use for years to come.