When life gives you lemons

You make lemonade.  Right?  We've all heard the saying.  But sometimes the bigger challenge is figuring out what the "lemonade" really is?

About 2 years ago, we treated the hens with a drug that had a long withdraw period.  And it simply broke my heart to toss all their eggs into the trash.  I couldn't feed them back to the hens or I'd simply prolong the withdraw period.

So as the eggs began to stack up higher and higher, I thought I'd try my hand at blowing them out.  I had done this as a child.  One year I took 3rd prize at the Saks Fifth Avenue Easter Egg decorating contest.  Which was kind of unfair because at the time we had a green egg layer, a goose and Japanese Quail.  So I had some pretty good material to work with.

Anyway, I started spending an hour here and there blowing out the hens eggs and before I knew it, I had dozens and dozens of empty eggs stacked up in the garage.  Then the question was, how do you decorate all those brown eggs.  I just assumed I couldn't color them.  So I tried painting, gluing and glittering, wrapping, etc. but I just didn't have the patience to spend that much time on a single egg when I had about 20 dozen to work with.

So on a whim, I picked up some gel food coloring and gave it a go and WOW, you really can dye brown eggs with pretty good success.  I added extra dye to the container and when each egg was dry, I rubbed them with olive oil to make them shinny.

My first thought was to decorate our Christmas tree with the eggs but I couldn't bring myself to put them away.  So I filed up a glass hurricane and set them out on display.

But I still had so many more eggs.  And it was bugging me that they'd been sitting in the garage all this time.  So over the weekend, I pulled out my handy hot glue gun and an old rose vine wreath that was sitting in the garage collecting dust.  And just started gluing the eggs onto the wreath in a random pattern.

And this is the end result.  I'm really quite pleased.  The colors really pop against the door and it's been so much fun to walk up the front walk and see this hanging on the door.  I'm sure from the street, they look like fake eggs.  You can't see the holes in them until you get up close.  Which is fine with me.  I know in my heart that my girls worked hard to help me make this spring wreath for the front door this year.