Beautiful Striped Eggs Made with a Simple Homemade Lathe

Easter is so early this year! I'm starting to gather ideas because we'll be hosting and I thought I'd start by posting some of my favorite Easter projects that I made during my years as a craft editor at Martha Stewart Living. These striped eggs were such a fun project. I had a rough path to developing the technique so it was especially rewarding when it finally worked out! 

I start with blown out eggs. (You can watch a video here to learn how to blow out eggs.) My first technique (that I thought was brilliant...but turned out to be a disaster) was to take a small inexpensive IKEA coffee frother and cut off the springy wire frother tip. I slid the egg onto the remaining metal wire and when I turned on the frother to spin it, the egg exploded into a hundred tiny pieces! I didn't realize that the eggshell was too fragile for the speed and vibration!
You can read here about the skewer and box technique (pictured above) which I finally landed on! The lathe is made from a recycled box and a skewer. The blown-out egg is slid onto the skewer and held in place with adhesive putty. It works well though it takes a little getting used to twisting the skewer to turn the egg while holding the paintbrush (the v-shaped notches in the box are where you rest the paintbrush). It's worth the practice because you'll get some pretty results once you get the hang of it! One more thing...I think pearlescent and/or metallic paint made the prettiest stripes!

After coming up with this project, I found egg lathes for sale (like the one pictured, above or this one) that work differently in that they don't require blowing out the eggs. Something new to try this year? Let me know if you've ever used one!
Happy Easter crafting!