Oology

I told you yesterday about the little craft that has kept me busy and slim this past week, but I forgot that the ones remaining belong to a few people who read this blog, so a picture would ruin the surprise--I'll post those next week. Our grocery store sells quail eggs and taking a tip from my sisters-in-law, who showed me how to craft chicken eggs using beads, I decided to do the same thing but on a smaller scale--with quail eggs. Here is what I do. First, I wash the egg and poke a hole in both ends then flush out the contents. I cover the egg in about eight layers of Elmer's glue--letting each layer dry before the next. Then I take special seed beads from Japan, they are called Deilcas, and place the beads in any configuration imaginable. Delicas are the best because they are the only seed beads I've found that are uniform in size--so you can actually make a grid of what you want the end product to look like--it is a miniscule mosaic. After all the beads are adhered (I cover the ENTIRE surface of the egg in seed beads), I start my favorite part--spicing it up with Swarovski crystals. These little gems are not cheap (about $10 for 100), but luckily in my working days I has a fascination for the little diamonds and stocked up, so I had plenty of sizes and colors to choose from. When the egg is to my liking, I shine it with Windex; it is the perfect little trick for making the crystals sparkle. I sent one to my mom last week, and she was really happy. You might wonder how I could send such a fragile object through the postal system. Well, my little girl threw that egg on the ground at least a dozen times before I put it in the mail. You see, the layers of Elmer's glue and the tight layer of beads protect the egg, so in the end, it is actually quite durable. It is a very intricate process, but just the thing I needed to keep my mind off snacking. Does anyone else find that having something difficult to DO can actually make you not think about food? My daughter and I went to the local county museum today and they had a whole floor dedicated to Oology; the study of eggs. I was fascinated by all of the different eggs. There were so many sizes, shapes, and colors. Each new little egg on display gave me a new idea for crafting. So when the museum curator winds up missing hundreds of display eggs, tell him the eggs are fine, but just a little bit more sparkly than before.