How to Decorate Easter Eggs with Decoupage

Karen Kormondy: Hi! my name is Karen Kormondy with Ipso Crafto in Washington D.C. and today, I am showing you how to decorate Easter eggs. In this video clip, we will be doing decoupage with tissue paper or magazine clippings to decorate your blown out, preservable Easter eggs that we showed you in previous clips on how to remove the yolk and the egg white. These are completely inedible because of the glue. You just wouldn't want it on your Easter egg that you are going to be eating. So and these are also very great because you can keep them for year after year for your decorations. So let's get started. Your basic tools are going to be a paintbrush. Any kind of quality, usually the kid's ones are even better because the nylon bristles are good for the glue. You are going use a decoupage medium or clear drying glue, thinned out just a little bit. Decoupage medium is already thinned. So you can just use it straight out of the jar or bottle and then your blown out Easter egg and a tissue paper or magazine clippings of different colors and that type of thing and to start, the tissue paper is probably the easier kind. So, I probably recommend to do that with young children probably as young as three can do this craft pretty easily and your just basically, going to cut out squares of the tissue paper in different colors and you can also cut out different shapes, but I found that squares have the best coverage for the Easter egg shape and you can always add on different shapes like if you wanted to cut out maybe a tiny little flower or maybe some circles or dots, you can always add those on later after your squares are put on to your egg. This is of course, a washed and cleaned egg. It has been dried overnight and you are just going to take your decoupage medium and put a little bit on to the shell about the size of one of these pieces of our tissue paper and you are going to smooth the tissue paper on to it. It will wrinkle up on the edges because of course; you are putting a flat piece of tissue paper on to a round surface so it's always going to be a little bit of overlap and a little bit of creasing. But as you can see from this one it makes it more interesting because the color then changes with each crease and you are going to continue doing that overlapping all of the pieces so that there is a full coverage and so you are going to cover over a little bit of the side of the piece that you just did as well as the shell and then you are going to put your next piece on and the great thing about tissue is that the color shows through and of the piece underneath it. So you can really make some cool colors as you mix the different ones. So like there is purple and green together and it just makes a cool, funky color. After you have put on a couple of pieces you want to go back and smooth down the creases by painting more of the decoupage medium on top of it and this helps seal the decoration as well, as well as give it a nice, glossy coat which will help protect it through the years after you put it on your table this year and put it in the box for next year and keep reusing the decoration. Then once it's all dry, you want to put one final coat on to the Easter egg just to give it, just a little bit more protection and really make sure that it is all even in the -- with the gloss and different just to make sure that it's evenly coated. One note about decoupage medium is that you can either use matte finish or gloss finish. Most brands have both available. This one here is a matte finish. A gloss is going to be very glass like. So, that's going to be your choice to decide which one you want to make. I like the matte because it's a little bit more realistic, but then if you want like a really glamorous Easter egg, use the gloss. So then you are just going to set that to dry. I like to use Styrofoam plates because they are disposable and they also don't pick up anything while it's drying like a paper plate might and that's it and then just rinse out your brush with regular water. Now in our next clip we are going to be showing you how to use blown out or just regular Easter eggshells to make egg dioramas. So stay tuned for that.