Feature Friday- Beaded Faberge Egg Tutorial

A unique take on Faberge Eggs, this simple process of glue and beads turns a regular chicken egg into a beaded work of art!  These Beaded Faberge eggs can be great decorations for Christmas or Easter depending upon your mood!

beaded faberge egg tutorial

I have been making Ukrainian eggs for over a year now. But my dealings with decorating eggs have far preceded the Ukrainian eggs. About five years ago, I wanted to come up with something original for the ornament club and the idea of Faberge eggs came to mind. Of course, I’m wanting to make something fabulous and as usual, I have a dollar store budget. But frankly, I’ve never let that stop me before. So with a bunch of seed beeds, ribbon and acrylic paint, I came up with these:

beaded faberge egg tutorial

They were a big hit. So now, I would like to re-create just the beaded part of the egg and leave the painting for other projects. After all, I’ve learned a whole lot about dealing with eggs in the past year and now I have tricks. Tricks, I tell you.

For this project, I used:

Chicken Eggs
Narrow Gold Ribbon
Narrow Blue Ribbon
Seed Beads
Hot Glue
Aleene’s Tacky Glue
1/2″ Gold Ribbon

Let’s start by dealing with that egg. Back when I made the original eggs, I blew them out the old fashioned way. That would be by using a thumb tack to puncture both ends of the egg, stirring up the yolk with a toothpick, and blowing out the egg, turning blue in the process and totally grossing myself out. Not that I don’t like eggs, but cooking them is preferred. Just saying.

This method, while effective, can result in quite a few egg disasters and usually took more than one attempt and a large amount of eggs.

beaded faberge egg tutorial

Then I found this. You can buy it on line for about $8.00 and it lasts forever. I’ve probably blown at least 100 eggs with this one.

Use the little green handled drill to make a tiny hole in the bottom of the egg. Insert the needle to break up the yolk. Pump air into the egg with the hand-held bellows and needle. The air then forces the material out of that tiny hole. After completely emptied, pour water into the bellows and flush out the remainder of the egg. I purchased mine through All Things Ukrainian.

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Now that we have the eggs prepared, set up your workstation. Because eggs have a bad habit of rolling around, I use a small muffin tin to sit them in while I am working with them. This makes a great drying station.

beaded faberge egg tutorialbeaded faberge egg tutorial

Take your narrow ribbon and glue onto your egg using the hot glue. Wrap around the egg lengthwise to mark off four equal sections and then once around the middle. You will end up with eight sections.

beaded faberge egg tutorial

Now use a pencil and make a design. Any design will do. I did find that the less elaborate designs seem prettier. But that is just me. I made each of my sections a repetitive design, but there is no law that says you have to.

beaded faberge egg tutorial

Now, using the tacky glue and a toothpick, add glue to the section where you would like to apply a certain color bead.

beaded faberge egg tutorial

Then holding the egg over a bowl to catch loose beads, shake your beads over the section of glue to coat.

beaded faberge egg tutorial

Tap off the excess beads and carefully push any beads that stray into the proper position. Repeat for other sections of the egg.

beaded faberge egg tutorial
beaded faberge egg tutorial

You will probably want to work on more than one egg at a time, allowing the glue to dry before moving onto other colors.

Once the eggs are fully beaded, add a bow to the top. I just wrapped ribbon around my fingers until it looked like a pretty bow and then hotglued it on. Nothing too fancy.

beaded faberge egg tutorial

And there you go! You will find that the eggs are much less breakable with the addition of all that glue and beads. And they sure look pretty on the tree.

beaded faberge egg tutorial
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