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.
This looks like SUCH a cute project. I wonder if my teens would think they are too old and cool for sparkly dinosaur eggs?
ReplyDeleteIt really surprised us, usually we have maybe 12 or 15 kids (it's really a surprise when we have 20+), but a crowd of parents and kids started forming and we ended up using all 30 eggs and the parents all stayed with their kids and were just as interested in it. If it were me I would definitely still want to make one! :)
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