Easter Egg dying with Distress Ink

Easter Eggs dying with Tim Holtz distress Inks

Happy Easter Crafters! Here is our first easter project showing step by step how to dye eggs with distress inks.

Easter Egg dying with Distress Inks

Step one: Make holes in either end of the eggs. A needle will do but we used a dremel for a quick solution.
Step two: Blow the contents out of the slightly larger hole in the bottom after first scrambling the insides with a pin to make it easier. If wanting to use the egg contents later for breakfast or lunch make sure any piercing equipment is clean.
Step three: Wash eggs with cold water. Run tap over and through, submerge in bowl of water and blow out water. Use microwave in ten second bursts to dry and sterilise or leave on paper towels in sun to dry.
Step four: Use electrical tape to makes spirals around egg or cut into strips for letters.
Step five: In a pot goes a teaspoon of white vinegar, one cup of hot water and 5-20 drops of distress ink.
Step five: Put eggs carefully in water with dye after stirring dye in. Allow to sit for five minutes, turn occasionally. Dripping extra drops directly onto the eggs produces more dramatic effects but don't turn the dripped on side back into the inky water.
Step six: Remove and leave on paper towels to dry. At this stage you are meant to move the electrical tape slightly so that the second colour produces an interesting effect from the overlapped area but I wasn't feeling lucky so I chickened out (get it chicken, egg bah ha!) and didn't attempt it.
Step seven: Repeat with second colour.
Step eight: Once dry remove electrical tape and you're done!

Use the marker spritzer for special effects of speckled distress maker colours.

Distress Marker Spritzer - Head in the clouds

Head in the Clouds - Full page Scrapbook layout using Graphic45 paper Mother Goose

I was excited about two things when doing this layout. You can laugh if you like but it was my first full page scrapbook layout. Up until then I had only done pocket layouts. I was a little nervous about breaking out from the neatly defined rectangles and going so free with my layout...but I think it turnned out ok. What do you think? (Please comment below this post). Secondly I was playing with the new Tim Holtz Marker Spritzer. It's fresh from CHA and very cool but I have a little disclaimer here. This layout is not the best example of it in use as I hadn't got the hang of it yet! More projects will follow. Just to show you it does work when you know what you're doing I will put a picture of a butterfly my son did as part of a lovely letter he crafted.

My son using the Tim Holtz Marker Spritzer

Now back to the scrapbooking, I started out with a base of blue American Craft cardstock 12x12 of course. I began experimenting with Graphic45's Mother Goose paper which I had nabbed a while ago and put in store knowing one day I would start scrappin my daughter's baby photos. So here I was inspired by the "Bedtime Story" line on the paper so I cut that out using my knife, ruler and self healing mat. I also cut the strip of nursery rhyme stamps and played around a while deciding which should act as the bed for the photo to rest on. I used the rule of thirds, more or less, in placing my photo on the page where the points of focus would converge with the points on the imaginary grid of the rule of thirds.

Glueing on strips of paper using 3M glue applicator

Then I glued the strips on using this awesome double-ended applicator glue tube from 3M.

These mini ink pads from Tim Holtz are new and oh so cute. They are designed to be just like the larger versions but more compact and portable. You can click them together to stack them up. Also available are new rounded mini blending tool and refill pads but I haven't splashed out on those yet so I can't show you what they look like. I can only tell you that they work better than the larger rectangle version (in my photo) because they don't leave the harsh edges when you're inking. I used some broken china ink and the mini black soot one to put some vignette edges around my photo and at the base of my layout on the corners of the blue card. 

I used the Marker Spritzer on the clouds to give some silver, grey, white or blue speckles to the various clouds. Some of the cut out cloud shapes were placed under a Tim Holtz Dot Fade Stencil and then Distress Paint applied over top to mask out some cloud areas in the background sky at the top of the page. Then I stamped with embossing ink and sprinkled on some clear embossing powder and used my heat gun to set the large star top right in the layout. Gem stickers were placed around the sky as stars. Clouds were layered on with dimensional tape.