Egg-Free Easter Egg Decorating Ideas

by Kelley Lindberg


Dyeing Easter eggs is a tradition, of course, but when you have a child with an egg allergy, it’s no longer a welcome tradition! But don’t worry… there are plenty of ways to decorate "egg-less eggs" and create a new Easter craft tradition for your family. Here are just a few ideas to get you ready for the Easter Bunny this year, from the super-simple to the more complex.

• Decorate wooden, ceramic, or plastic eggs. Craft stores carry eggs in all sorts of materials. Depending on the age of your kids, you can do something as simple as putting stickers on plastic eggs, or you can get more creative with markers, paints, glue, glitter, ribbon, or wire. Here is a website with instructions for painting wooden eggs.
• Bake your Easter eggs. Use your favorite safe cookie recipe and some Easter-themed cookie cutters to bake cookies, then decorate them. Think about it – wouldn’t you rather eat a cookie than a hard-boiled egg anyway?
• Make Jell-O Jiggler eggs. If you have Easter-shaped molds, you can make Jigglers in fun Easter shapes. But even if you don’t have any Jell-O molds, you can use the recipe on the Jell-O box to make a pan of Jigglers, then use Easter cookie cutters to cut out shapes.
• Make safe chocolate shapes. Melt safe chocolate chips, and pour the melted chocolate into Easter-shaped plastic molds (available at craft stores) to make your own safe chocolate. Here is a website with some instructions for making your own chocolate lollipops. They use non-safe chocolate wafers, but you should be able to substitute something like Enjoy Life Foods’ chocolate chips instead with similar results.
• Make hard-candy stained-glass Easter eggs. With some metal cookie cutters in Easter egg shapes and a bag of safe hard candy, you can make stained-glass candy eggs. Here is a website with instructions for making hard-candy stained-glass ornaments.
• Try making Easter window clings. This website shows how to make window clings – just draw your own Easter egg design instead of the rainbow, and you can display a fun Easter egg in your window.
• Print Easter coloring pages. Low on time, energy, and creativity? No problem. Print some Easter Egg coloring pages from the internet, and let your kids color them while you tackle Easter dinner. Just search for Easter Egg Coloring Pages, and you’ll find more than enough to keep any kid busy for a while.

Those are just a few ideas. I'm sure you'll have many more, so please share them with us!

Creative Easter Egg Fillers

by Kelley Lindberg


It’s fun being a creative mom. Or so I’ve been told.

Most days, I’m feeling far too tired/frazzled/exhausted/rushed/over-scheduled/overwhelmed to even think about being creative. So I love it when someone else is creative for me, and then I can just steal their ideas. Don’t you?

In that spirit, I’m offering some creative Easter Egg ideas, so that you can steal them and simplify your Easter celebrations! And I know there are other parents out there with even better ideas, so PLEASE post them in the comments! With food allergies, filling the eggs with candy isn’t always an option. (And even without allergies, who wants their kids hopped up on all the sugar anyway?) So here are some candy-free ideas.

First, a quick tip: Oriental Trading Co. is a wonderful resource for small, cheap novelty toys to go into Easter eggs. You can buy eggs pre-filled with toys and stickers (super-easy!), or you can buy small toys, erasers, bouncy balls, or jewelry to fill your own. (You can also order empty eggs and even jumbo-sized empty eggs that will hold larger toys or dollar bills,) Most of their novelties come in quantities of a dozen or more. Not sure you want to buy 12 of something? Talk to other parents and see if they'll go in with you on an order, then split up the toys between you. I’ve done that several times, and it works out great.

Most of the party stores in town seem to get a lot of their supplies from Oriental Trading Co., too, so if you just need a few things, try the party stores or the party aisle at discount and pharmacy stores like Walmart, Target, or Rite-Aid.

Now for some ideas:

• At Oriental Trading Co.’s website, don’t just look at the Easter-themed novelties. Check out all the toys, from glow rings to mini plush animals, from surf-board necklaces to water squirters, from tiny flashlights to mini skateboards. They even have small, inexpensive craft kits.
• Summer is coming – look for sidewalk chalk (open the package and put each chalk in a different egg), bubbles, pool diving toys, or foam water balls. Putting 2 or 3 water balloons in each egg is cheap and will get them well-supplied for that first water-balloon fight of the season!
• UFAN member Suzanne suggests buying a Legos set, then putting a few pieces into each egg, and the instruction book in their basket. Got more than one kid? Color-code the eggs so each kid knows which eggs he can collect, so the sets don’t get mixed up.
• Got a girl who’s into Polly Pockets or Barbie? Buy a few clothing sets, open them, and put the clothes and accessories into each egg.
• For boys, take HotWheels cars, Bakugan balls, BeyBlades, or Nerf Darts out of the packages and put them in the eggs. (You’ll need jumbo-sized eggs for most of these things.)
• For girls, try hair accessories in every color, fingernail stickers, or rolls of ribbon to make their own bike streamers or hair decorations.
• For older kids, try trading cards, Silly Bandz, friendship bracelets, lip gloss, nail polish, guitar picks, earrings, sweat bands, cool shoelaces, magnets for their school locker, key rings, bicycle spoke clip-ons, or marbles.
• Try craft supplies, like beading, sand art, mosaics, clay (make sure it’s allergen-free), ribbons, embroidery thread, cotton loops for weaving pot-holders, wire, paints for model-building, and foam pieces. Break up the sets and put the big pieces in the basket, and little pieces in the eggs.
• Is your child a budding gardener? How about packets of seeds?
• Last year, my son got The Big Book of Boy Stuff in his basket, then found eggs with the things that are used in the book’s activities, like dice, kick sacks (for juggle balls), and marbles.
• Is your child saving up to buy something special, like an iPod or video game? Put coins or bills in each egg, along with a note or a little picture of the item to show her what the money’s for.
• Is there a family trip coming up? Again, put money in the eggs with a note that says what it’s for, or pictures of the place you’re going. Headed to Europe? Order Euros from your bank and hide them in your child’s eggs. If you don’t want younger kids carrying real money, print fake money (like the Lego Loot or Mickey Money I made for my son when we went to California one year). Then tell them they can trade the money to you for souvenirs – it gives them a lesson on managing money without you worrying that they’ll lose it along the way.
• Just want to focus on the basket or one larger gift? Fill the eggs with clues to find the basket. Each egg can have a clue that points to the next egg, which points to the next egg, and so on until the child finds the basket.
• One more tip: If you’re hiding the eggs outside, be aware that if the kids open the eggs outside, they may lose the contents in the grass. So if you’re using tiny things that will be a problem if they get lost (like Lego pieces or Barbie’s new shoes), discuss the rules ahead of time – if you want them to bring all the eggs inside before they open them, be sure they understand, and make it part of the fun to keep the surprise until everyone is inside and can see.

Well, that’s what I came up with so far. If you’ve got a good idea for filling eggs, please, please share it, so that all of us frazzled moms and dads can steal your idea and make our kids’ Easter more fun. Like UFAN member Suzanne told me, “The most important thing is making sure our kids don't get gypped on holidays.”

Egg Cartons and Pinto Beans

Every year, Kim and I get to search for safe alternatives at our sons’ school for parties, craft supplies, and other activities. It begins to feel like a scavenger hunt sometimes: “We need some egg-, milk-, and nut-free gum drops to use on a gingerbread house. I’ll start with the stores on the west side. You hit the stores on the east.”

We’ve already had our first scavenger hunt of the year now. Our boys’ fourth grade teacher uses egg cartons and pinto beans to help her students understand division and multiplication. They use the twelve sections of the egg carton and divide up the beans between them – a good tactile reinforcement of math.

The only problem is, the used egg cartons the teacher has been saving for several months to use in the classroom aren’t safe for Kim’s egg-allergic boy. So off on a scavenger hunt we went!

First, I tried ice cube trays. At Target, the ice cube trays had sixteen compartments. At the dollar store, they had fourteen compartments. I stood in the aisle, a mountain of blue and white ice cube trays in front of me, and called Kim. “They have 14 compartments. Do you think that’s okay?”

“Maybe we could saw the extra two off the end,” she suggested.

“Or maybe we could paint the extra two compartments a different color and tell the kids not to use them,” I said.

Both solutions sounded kind of lame. We thought for a minute. Then Kim had an idea. “Forget the ice cube trays,” she said. “Let me make some phone calls.”

Later that afternoon, Kim had found an egg farm in the phone book, called them, and spoke to a nice man who just happened to have several dozen brand-new, unused egg cartons, still in their plastic wrappers, sitting in his office. It turns out they’d changed their packaging recently, and these egg cartons were the leftover old style and he didn’t know what to do with them.

Kim did.

So she drove out to the egg farm, and drove away with 54 unused, uncontaminated egg cartons.

When she took them to the school this morning, the teacher gave her a strange look. Kim quickly explained why these cartons were safe, and the teacher was very relieved. “I thought surely you should know egg cartons weren’t safe for your own kid!” the teacher laughed.

So all is good now. I’m buying a new bag of pinto beans this afternoon for the teacher to use (because her old ones would be contaminated with last year’s used egg cartons). So by tomorrow, the kids will be multiplying and dividing their way to a whole new level.

And Kim and I can chalk up another successful scavenger hunt!