Yarn Omelet

To make an omelet you must first break a few eggs.  To make a yarn egg, you must first break a dozen balloons, an entire bottle of craft glue, half a gallon of liquid starch, multiple balls of yarn, some flour, sugar, and a lot of time and patience.  Or maybe it’s just me. 

Recently I’ve seen many yarn and twine balls used as party decorations and had some very happy childhood flashbacks of making a similar craft with my scout troop.  I thought if I could do it as a child, it must be simple and could make for a fun Sunday afternoon.  So I trolled the blogs and craft sites and to my surprise, found that debate on the best way to go about making the little buggers was varied and passionate.

 Well maybe I’m a little lazy, or maybe it’s because I already had the glue, but my first attempt at yarn eggs involved soaking the yarn in a glue and water mixture and covering the balloon in small strips.  The balloon looked GREAT!  And it was only slightly messy.  However, when the glue dried and I tried to deflate (make sure you deflate the balloon, don’t pop!) the balloon the entire egg deflated with it.  At first I thought maybe I didn’t let it dry long enough, so I waited to free my other remaining eggs from their balloons another 24 hours.  It didn’t help.

My next step was to try the liquid starch method.  I tried the Heavy Duty formula and once again draped my yarn strips on the balloon.  Again it looked great, but the best part was that the starch was far less messy than the glue and made the entire room smell like clean laundry.  My faith was restored but I chose to wait and let the yarn dry a little longer than they probably needed.  Unfortunately this didn’t help much, and while one of the six eggs I tried to make did retain it’s egg-like shape, it wasn’t strong enough to hang.  I took to violently stabbing the last few balloons in frustration.

But there was NO WAY I was going to be beaten by yarn and balloons, so I pulled out the big guns: a recipe for paper mache glue.  (Boil 2 cups water; add ½ cup flour and another 2 cups cold water; BOIL; remove from heat and add 3TB sugar; COOL)  This was by far the messiest and smelliest of the three methods.  But I dug in, turned on some good music and got that goop everywhere.  I saturated the yarn in small sections but didn’t cut the yarn this time.  It was much easier to work with this way.  But it took days to dry and the smell got worse the drier they got! 

So finally I got the courage to deflate and remove my balloons and HALLELUJAH!  It looked like an egg!  And it only took me 2 weeks to get it right!

So, while my suborn streak has been satisfied, I think I’ll be sticking to making my omelets with the smaller more delicious kind of egg from now on…maybe adding a  little spinach…and cheese…oh and mushrooms.  

Yum…

Jennifer