Dyed eggshell Easter Egg mosaic craft

With term having broken up two weeks before Easter this year, we seem to have had plenty of time for Easter crafting. Harry has also developed a bit of an obsession with Easter Egg hunts after I made him a treasure hunt with clues, which is no bad thing as it's giving him lots of practice with his writing as he writes out clues for me to follow.

A little while ago I experimented with dyeing some eggshells, with no clear idea what to do with them when they were finished. Then it struck me that making them into Easter Egg mosaics would be the perfect craft for the dyed bits of eggshell, and it was a great craft that we could all do together.

I used the egg shells saved from four eggs and I went for three colours - red, blue and yellow. I just used normal food colouring, with a generous amount added to water in three bowls. The red worked the best and the yellow the worst, as by the time we came to use the eggshells it had faded to white. I thoroughly washed and dried the eggshells, then left them in halves to soak in the dye for a couple of hours.

Then I removed them from the dye and left them to drain and dry on kitchen paper before breaking them up into smaller pieces.

I cut the egg shapes from pastel cardboard, drawing round a template which I found on-line. I kept them quite small so that they wouldn't be overwhelming. Then we used PVA glue to stick the pieces of shell to the egg. I encouraged the children to make patterns, but Mia was quite happy to just cover the egg with glue and sprinkle the pieces on. Harry also used a few bits of shell to decorate an Easter card that he had made. You could easily use the egg shells for more complex mosaics, as they can simply be broken up to fit the size of gap that you want to fill.

I think they look really pretty, we'll be using them as Easter decorations of some sort, perhaps stringing them up to make bunting.