If you would like to add a personal touch to any party, have fun creating easy-to-make photo flowers. They are especially nice if they feature old photographs of the honoree. Not only do they look great, but guests love looking at them and teasing the guest of honor. Always a good ice breaker!

Click here for easy instructions.

Every year at this time, we love to pull out the Ukranian eggs that we have been making since the girls were little. (Well, I was actually told by a Ukranian egg expert once, that our eggs can’t officially be called Ukranian eggs since we don’t officially use the Ukranian egg patterns and symbols. Since we take a more “creative” approach to our design choices, we are supposed to call our eggs “Art Eggs.” So here is our box of Art Eggs.

How to make Art Eggs:
First we blow out the eggs, then we use styluses with lumps of beeswax that we melt over candles. We dye the egg a light color and cover anything we want to save in that color with wax from a stylus. Then we dye it the next darker color and save again and so on and so on. It ends up looking like it is covered in black wax at the end. And then comes the fun part. We either hold it over a candle and gently wipe off the wax with a tissue and magically the beautiful design appears, or recently we figured out a way to do that last step in the toaster oven! Yep, it’s a mess. A big, fun mess. With a beautiful treasure at the end.

Here are some tips if you would like to take up Ukranian egg making–I mean Art Egg making:

1. Turn on some good old movies that you’ve seen a million times so that you don’t actually have to watch them, because this is a slow and tedious process. Take plenty of snack breaks.
2. One year we learned that you can actually leave the yolk inside the egg and not blow it out, and over time (like 5 years) it will dry up inside. Note: Store your ‘yolk-in eggs’ somewhere that could handle an explosion. This happened once and it was pungent.
3. The year that it did happen, and we had them stored all together, we had to put them outside to air out. Note: Do not leave them outside in case it rains. We learned this the hard way, and the eggs from that year have a sort of washed effect.
4. Buy these great egg holders that I just found this year at Target. Not only do they enable you to store many eggs in a small space, but they look pretty cool when they are full!

This is a tradition that your family might take wherever they may land. In fact, Ellen, do you have some pictures from your Ukranian/Art Egg making in California this year?? Love, Mom

Here they are. Three California eggs…

I really wanted to get my hands on a goose egg or two this year, but I settled on some big organic brown ones. The brown ones can be really nice, offsetting the saturation of the dyes and adding a soft country feel to the eggs.

So…when the three of us were in grade school and prolifically producing schoolwork, my mom was always diligent about sorting and binding a “best of” for each academic year. It’s so satisfying to be able to go back and quickly get a glimpse of yourself at 8, 12 and 16 years old. However, while the uniform pages of our academic lives were conducive to a book format – the artwork produced during these years varies largely in size – and why shouldn’t it? So the question becomes, “Where will the masterpieces of childhood reside?” Under the bed? Bound up in a portfolio, never to see the light of day? In a flatfile – if you’re lucky, or if you’ve got a couple hundred extra dollars to spare and a chunk of space.

Enter: the portfolio box.

Once you’ve made one, you’ll probably want to make another, because not only do they look beautiful together, but unlike the under-bed scenario, a portfolio box, beautiful and inviting on the bookshelf in the living room cries out to you or your guests, “Open me. Discover the treasures that surely lie within!” (or something to that extent…)

It is simply a clamshell box that is large enough and flat enough to suit a substantial stack of papers. I received a professional one as part of a trade portfolio once, and modeled all the others after it. The great part is, a professional box will run from $100 up, but you can build one for about $12!

For some quick step-by-step instructions, click here.

And now you have a beautiful place to store flat artwork that also invites you to actually look at said artwork on a regular basis… Instead of a coffee table book, try a coffee table box!

Happy Sticky Fingers!

(This post is now one of the projects you can find at A Soft Place to Land’s Do It Yourself Party.)