Painted egg

This painted egg has a bit of history behind it!

When I was at primary school, there was a competition each Easter for the best-decorated hard-boiled egg. It was a lot of fun, with eggs decorated as all sorts of animals, people and objects, and we always enjoyed going round all the other classes to see their eggs.

When I reached the final year of primary school, I decided to make quite a subtle and artistic egg, with a painted design on it. I based the design on a painting of flowers and trellis that was in a craft book. And that year I won the prize for the best egg!

Unfortunately hard-boiled eggs don’t last very long! And I had no close-up photos of my egg. And somewhere along the way the craft book I’d taken the design from disappeared. But I never forgot my egg, and always wanted to recreate it.

This painted wooden egg was one attempt to make something similar. Although I remembered the flowers on my original egg had been blue, I decided to go for cherry blossoms instead.

The drawing was also based on the same idea, and was for a competition a few years ago at work for the best Easter egg design, which I actually won! I feel a little bit guilty about this, as the competition was really meant for the pupils, and I only entered to try to encourage them! But the pupils who were judging the competition decided to award me the prize.

After painting the egg, and doing the drawing, I finally found another copy of the craft book I originally based my egg design on, which is the Reader’s Digest Manual of Handicrafts. And I realised that the image I based my design on has a lot in common with some of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s stencil designs (which is the connection with my Mackintosh Month!)

Now that I have the book, I look forward to sometime in the future making a true recreation of my old egg!