String Easter Eggs

The kids made string eggs yesterday afternoon! I had made a version of these when I was in grade school, and have wanted to do them with the kids for awhile now. I finally got brave enough to try them this year. =) I remember making them with a sugar water mixture, but I found this glue version online and thought we would try it out.
The first thing we did was go to Michael's and pick out stringy yarn for the kids' eggs. Zach chose a red & white variegated one, Riley chose a pastel rainbow one, and Lily chose a pink variegated one. We cut the yarn into strands (we did long ones at first, but they ended up being too hard for the kids, so we made the next set we cut shorter), poured bottle glue onto a paper plate, mixed in a few drops of water to make it a little less thick, and blew up some balloons:

Then we drug the string through the glue and wrapped it around the balloons.

Zach did his almost all by himself. He had a hard time at first with his string because it kept falling off. We discovered that he didn't have a lot of glue on his string and he wasn't wrapping it tightly. After we fixed a few strings, he got the hang of it. I'm glad he did, because he was getting so frustrated and wanted to quit. I think he's glad he stuck with it though after he saw the end result.

Riley only needed a little bit of help from me. He was really good at wrapping it, he just had a hard time with those long strings. It was easier for him when I cut shorter ones for him.

Lily loved doing this. I wasn't too sure how she was going to like glue all over her hands. She did run to the bathroom several times to wash her hands off in the middle of wrapping her balloon, but she didn't seem to mind too much. I helped her, but she did wrap several strings by herself and put glue on almost all of her strings.

It took us about 45 minutes to wrap the balloons. They probably could have wrapped them more, but they were starting to get bored with it, and I didn't want it to not be fun for them.

When they were done, I tied one end of a string onto each balloon and the other end to the light over our table so they hung down. I also put newspaper down for the glue drips.

We let them dry from Friday afternoon until Saturday morning. The strings were hard, so we knew they were ready. We got a needle to pop the balloon. Zach was first. He was so excited to pop it!

When it popped, it took some of the string with it, and I was worried that it didn't work, but we just pulled the balloon gently away from the string, and carefully pushed the string back out to the shape it was before we popped the balloon.

Then Zach pulled the balloon out of the top of the egg:

Riley was next to pop his balloon:

I love the looks on their faces!

After we pushed the strings back out to make an egg shape, we set them on the table.

They all turned out pretty good!

They all did a good job, and I think they turned out pretty well for our first time. If you are going to try this, make sure you have enough glue on your strings, and wrap the strings tightly around the balloon.

Good job Zach, Riley, and Lily!!