Friday, April 15, 2011

Sun-Catcher Eggs

 With Easter just around the corner I thought I should do a little festive project with the boys. 
One of our front windows has eggs strung up on it (super easy and cute, read about it here) and the other window was looking lonely, so I found something that could rememdy that.
 The same Family Fun book that we used for the less than perfect water gun painting we did had an idea for sun catchers. You probably have everything you need for at least one of the variations. 
To start off, I gave each boy a sheet of wax paper with a basic egg shape drawn on it. I drew the egg just so they would sort of have a guideline to work within. I would highly recommend putting cardboard under their paper. It makes things much easier to move from the table to the ironing board. Our first variation of eggs was with with sequins. I think I got this big bag with lots of shapes in it at Michael's.
Once they were arranged to the boys' liking, I put another wax paper sheet on top and moved them over to the ironing board. Set the iron on low. As long as it is low, you don't really need to cover the wax paper up like I did with a paper towel. Mine caught on the sequins a few times so I covered them and turned the heat up slightly.
Iron for about 5-8 seconds on each part of the egg.
When you are done you might find air bubbles. This is generally okay, but if they are on the edges, the guts of the egg might fall out. Try re-ironing these areas and see if that helps.
Once they cool down you can cut them out and hang them up.
The other version we did was what the book had suggested. I sharpened a bunch or crayons and the kids decorated the wax paper with the shavings.
 Follow the same ironing procedure as above.
 My recommendation would be to keep the layers or crayon sort of thin so you can still see the color shine though. If your kids are like mine, then they would rather have a big pile of shavings on theirs than have pretty colors shine though.
We did a few others with stickers that only look cool from the front. Other variations you could try would be bits of tissue paper, glitter, or even pressed flowers. And if you don't have wax paper or an iron, you can do the same project with contact paper. Just lay one sheet down sticky side up and place all the items on it. Carefully add another piece of contact paper (sticky sides together) and cut out. Or even one more way is to pre-cut your shape out of contact paper and then peel off the paper, decorate and stick directly to the window!
However you choose to do it, they will look fun in the window, despite being hard to photograph. My kids had a lot of fun with this one and we would have kept going, but I needed to make dinner!

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