Fabergé Eggs

If you are searching for an activity for April, why not go with Fabergé Eggs? I had been wanting to do a fabergé egg craft for some time; when I visited a nursing home, I took some large oversize books about the eggs and the jewelry created by the House of Fabergé, and I thought, why not have a craft for kids during April, when it's egg season?

For those of you in the Houston area, if you have a chance please visit the Houston Museum of Natural Science, where the McFerrin Collection is currently on display. There are two fabergé eggs in this collection, and as a big admirer of Peter Fabergé, I was ecstatic that they allowed photography!

The Fabergé website has a beautiful gallery of the eggs, and the Examiner has a good article that touches on the history of the eggs. I also made sure to mention to the kids that a man recently purchased one of the eggs thought to be lost at a sale, and was trying to sell it for about $500 (to be melted down into gold). No one was offering him any money, and a Google search soon led him to the discovery that it was a very valuable ($33 million dollar) Fabergé egg.

One of the handouts I had available was a Martha Stewart Crystal Egg Geode handout; I'd wanted to do this with the kids also, but it takes about two days with drying time, so it was not possible. But I made sure the handouts were available so they could try it at home. A very beautiful and scientific craft! Additionally, the Houston Museum of Natural Science has a really awesome Fabergé egg craft on their Beyond Bones blog, which gave me the idea to use tiny dinosaurs as a special surprise to go inside of the egg.

For our eggs we used: plastic Easter eggs, pipe cleaners, self-adhesive jewels, and tiny dinosaurs. I had some foam eggs and tissue paper as back up in case we ran out of plastic eggs.

The dinosaurs went inside the eggs, which were decorated with the self-adhesive jewels. Kids then made an egg stand out of pipe cleaners, and they could choose from two designs which I found at Spoonful.com: the Egg Pedestal  and a smaller stand that also has instructions on creating a Fabergé Egg.

These are the foam eggs with tissue, above the Martha Stewart Crystal Egg Geodes handouts. There was a really big turnout for this craft, probably the biggest I've had. I talked a little bit about the history behind the eggs, and used the book Masterpieces from the House of Faberge because it has beautiful, large photographs of many of the eggs.