With Easter fast approaching, Harry and I have been busy making an enormous egg.  Heaven knows what bird might have laid this egg, which is just short of 3 foot in length; it is certainly not a bird I would want to stumble across accidentally or whose nest I would want to unwittingly disturb.  Come Easter Sunday, it will hang from a tree in the garden filled with sweets and chocolate eggs, and be smashed, piñata-style, by an army of small egg-hunters.  Till then, it is safe and majestic atop a rather unsubstantial nest.

We began by inflating a large – huge – balloon.  Well actually, in truth we watched my husband inflate it and made encouraging noises as he turned slowly purple with the effort.  Team-work. Then we covered it with two layers of newspaper dipped in a mixture of white glue and water, pausing only occasionally to read the newspaper stories.

And then a final layer, this time of white paper (we used two sheets of flipchart paper, torn up), so that we could see when we’d finished an entire layer.

And then I painted it with some pale grey leftover tester paint, before dabbing on circles and speckles of paint, in brown and copper colours….

It looks pretty convincing!

It’s very light, at least until filled with chocolate…

Once it was completely dry, I cut a circular hole in the back (don’t cut it out entirely – it’s much easier to seal this way).  Harry filled the egg with chocolates, using an ‘add one, eat one’ policy and thus adding to the brown smudges around the egg.

At Easter, we’ll thread a rope up in through the egg and tie it to the old apple tree in our garden that’s currently filled with blossom.  Until then, we can just admire it…

p.s. two more of our papier-mache projects; the hot air balloon and the moon.

Have a great rest of the weekend!