Martha Stewart Easter

It seems that moving to New York has awakened my crafty-homemaker instincts. Ok maybe it is because I can actually call myself a "homemaker" now that these instincts have kicked in. Just this year I have completed a knitting course, and so far knitted one scarf and have both a jumper and another scarf on the go, embroidered several baby singlets for friends, and even converted an old desk into a play table for my son (post to follow).

So I guess it should not be all that surprising that in the lead up to Easter my brain was running overtime on egg decorating.This is not something I had done in years. I have memories of blowing eggs and dying them with onion skins with my Mum when I was little, but other than the occasional school art class, I have never thought about decorating eggs again. But here in New York, and maybe the USA generally, egg decorating is on every corner - ok not every corner, but the drugstores and supermarkets are stocked high with Easter Egg Decorating kits.

So a few weeks back I bought one of these packs and thought I would have some fun with Noah dying some eggs and letting him put stickers on them - and I thought this was a much better option than letting him gorge himself on chocolate eggs over the weekend. But alas my "craft-homemaker-cum-Martha-Stewart-instincts" kicked in. I read a blog post which described an art of tie-dying eggs (and by "tie" I mean the mens silk fashion accessory, not the colourful concentric ring style of clothing art popularised by hippies).

And so I set out to find some garishly bright 100% silk mens ties (hopefully on special) to use for my craft project. This took some work, but I finally found a discount mens suit store in TriBeCa which had a collection to meet my needs (pictured to the right) and I was all set. Eggs were blown (a harder process than I remembered from childhood), and ties cut up and tied around the eggs, before being boiled for 25 minutes.

This was all made more exciting by the fact that I was doing this at 12am (much to my husbands bewilderment) after returning from a nice evening out. It was a long 25 minutes for the first batch of 3 eggs, and I was nervous that my eggs would not be as vibrant as those I had seen.

So at 12:30am I unwrapped my first egg and it was disappointing - from the vibrant blue and gold tie almost no colour was imparted onto the egg (not pictured because lets face it, who likes to show off their failures?) I felt crushed - maybe more due to fatigue than anything else. The 2nd and 3rd eggs (pictured above) though were fantastic and I excitedly woke my husband to share in my crafty-homemaker-cum-Martha-Stewart prowess. He seemed less than thrilled but feigned some level of congratulatory pleasure for me and then asked if this meant I was going to sleep now?

The next day I did another batch of 3 eggs during the day and a final 4 late on Good Friday evening - after all I had set the table for our lunch-party the next day, and 6 eggs really didn't make a centre-piece (especially with one disappointing blue/gold creation). My husband bided me goodnight as I commenced blowing 4 eggs at 11pm.

The results were all great and I was very excited to place the eggs in the glass bowl for the centre-piece of our Easter table. I was even more thrilled when our guests commented on them and seemed impressed that I had dyed them myself using mens ties. I put it all down to my crafty-homemaker-cum-Martha-Stewart prowess.

(To see photos of all my eggs, please go to the "Crafty-Homemaker" page of this blog).