How to Uniquely Decorate Easter Eggs using Batik Technique

My daughter and I love to color eggs every year but the process is done so quickly and it's hardly worth the effort unless we do a large number of eggs, but who wants to do a lot of eggs that you're not going to want to eat.
Chinese Batik, wax printings have been both an art and a craft for centuries. Batik is one kind of major tradition for fabric painting that have many sections like dyeing, silk screening, layering, batik painting, dyeing and water painting. Batik is actually a hand drawn and hand painted technique which uses wax.
This year we started dyeing our Easter eggs using the Batik method. Here's how we did it.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• boiled eggs. If all you have are brown eggs, go ahead and use them. They actually work better in my opinion than white ones.
• food coloring all the colors in the box
• vinegar
• water in suitable for dyeing eggs
• a crayon

1. First boil your eggs. Here's a hint to save a little on the electricity used to boil the eggs. Put the eggs in to boil and cover with water. Then put a cover onto the pan. Bring to boil then turn off heat. Do not remove the cover for at least 20 minutes. If you remove the cover to the pan, the eggs will not hard boil.

2. After the eggs have cooled completely, make up the cups of dye. Add 1 teaspoon vinegar and 20 drops of desired color to 1/2 cup of boiling water.

3. Decide what design you want to put onto your egg. Let's say you want a blue egg with red stripes going the length of your egg rather than around your egg. Using your crayon, draw in your stripes around the egg. Put the egg into the blue dye. Leave for five minutes.

4. After the blue dye dries, remove the crayon wax from the egg using a razor blade. (Adults only!) Next color over the blue dyed area with your crayon so that this area that you've already dyed will not take in the color when you dip the egg into the red dye.

5. Dip the egg into the red dye for another 5 minutes. Remove then remove crayon from blue color on egg. Any one looking at the egg will wonder how you did it.

6. Once you understand how the concept works, you can create much more complicated designs. Just remember, Whatever isn't under the wax will be dyed.

Tips & Warnings

• Using eggs to learn Chinese Batik is not only a project that can be used at Easter but can also be used when studying Batik in an art class or with homeschoolers who are learning about China.
• Hot water and razor blades should only be handled by competent adults.

[FrazzledNanny]

on 4/17/2009 Thanks for the Batik Technique for decorating Easter Eggs. I'd love to see pictures. 5*

[NightScribe]

on 4/12/2009 I think the Batik technique will make very unique Easter eggs. Very interesting!