DIY Embridery Floss Easter Eggs

One of my favorite college buddies, Julie, and I had planned to get together yesterday and craft the night away. Julie lives about 45 minutes away, which isn't too bad but it was still far enough to turn it into a sleepover! We stayed up so late crafting and eating frozen grapes and cookies!

Last week Julie sent me a tutorial for embroidery floss Easter eggs, suggesting that we make them while we were together. I was soo pumped about the idea! We decided to go for it.

We followed Crafty Endeavor's tutorial to learn how to make these fun Easter eggs!

What you need to make the eggs:

• Sta Flo liquid starch....found on most detergent aisles
• Flour
• Embroidery floss (you know the stuff you use to make friendship bracelets with?)--- get a bunch of colors! One skein of floss will cover one balloon
• Balloons (we did not use water balloons as suggested by Crafty Endeavor but I think they would've worked better!)

To start, I would recommend blowing up your balloons...that way you aren't having to wash your hands in between each egg wrapping just to blow up another balloon....we finally caught on to that a few eggs in :)

After you blow up your balloons, make your gluey mixture. You need to mix 1 Cup of liquid starch with 1/2 Cup of flour. Mix it really good and get all the clumps out. We doubled this mixture to start and then ending up making a little more later on after finishing some of the eggs and realizing we needed a little more.

Next you need to get to wrapping those balloons!

These are the steps we took and were most happy with (after trying multiple processes and not liking them as much)...

1. Completely unwind the skein of floss you are going to use so that it doesn't tangle and knot as you are wrapping the balloon.
2. Rub a VERY light coat of the glue onto your balloon to make it sticky.
3. Start wrapping the yarn around the balloon....we did not care about making any patterns...just tried to evenly cover the balloon with the floss.
4. Once the balloon is wrapped, dip the tips of your fingers into the glue mix and spread it onto the floss wrapped balloon. Try to make sure most of the floss is covered so that all of it will harden. It does not need to be thick but use enough to make the floss nice and wet.
5. Lay the balloon onto wax paper to dry...we flipped ours after a few hours but then let them harden over night. 
6. REPEAT with your next balloon and keep on trucking until your heart's content.
7. Once the floss has completely hardened you can pop the balloons. We used toothpicks to pop them and then the balloons collapsed and shriveled up....really cool to watch but hard to describe! Then we pulled the balloons out through the biggest gaps in the floss.
8. You can finish by scraping off excess hardened glue and stick them in a vase or string them together to make an egg garland. 

Here they are hardening...

Notes and Warnings:

• We tried coating the floss in the glue first and then wrapping around the balloon but found it to be more difficult but the eggs all turned out the same no matter which method we used.
• I also wrapped up a plastic cup with some floss using the same method...it turned into a cool little floss cup :)
• Use NEW balloons....we used some old ones and some of them deflated as they were drying, which caused the eggs to collapse! Not cool! See the pictures below to see what I mean...'

Here is a shot of mine on display on my kitchen island!

This was a very messy but very fun project! I put a fitted sheet down to wrap around my table to protect it from the glue. We then put wax paper down to put the eggs on so that the sheet wouldn't stick to the eggs. Be prepared to have a mess but a lot of fun if you try this out!