There is less than one week until Easter Sunday. You may be planning on decorating Easter eggs this week, so I wanted to share our experience with some of the new Paas Egg Dying Kits for 2012. There are actually 8 new kits this year, but I chose the 3 that I thought my children would enjoy the most and would make the least amount of mess. It is one of my ongoing goals to find low-mess children's craft projects that still have an end result they can be both excited about and proud of.The 3 kits I opted to try are the Paas Deggorating Doodles, the Eggstra Terrestrials, and the 3D Eggsplosion kit. The Deggorating Doodles kit came with four markers and two strips of wax paper stencils. The tips of the marker were soft, making them more like a cross between a fine-tipped marker and a paintbrush. The Eggstra Terrestrials kit came with six eggarounds and one sheet of glow-in-the-dark foam stickers. The 3D Eggsplosion Kit included 3D chalk, 3D glasses, a sheet of stickers and six eggarounds. All kits came with a pack of dye tablets and a wire egg dipper.
(Click any photo to enlarge)
One thing that is cool about having more than one kit is that you can look for one kit that has the standard dye colors and the second one can have the brighter neon colors. Also, with 3 children, there was less waiting because we had set up more cups of dye this year.
My favorite parts of the 3 kits were the eggarounds, the 3D chalk, and the glow-in-the-dark foam stickers. The eggarounds were so easy to use. You just slip one around a dyed egg that is already dry and drop it into boiling water for 2 or 3 seconds. The eggaround shrinks right up and creates a beautifully decorated egg. Although the eggarounds looked very cool in the end, there was not much hands-on fun for the kids when using those. Also, the eggarounds do not fit over eggs that are especially round.
The glow-in-the-dark foam stickers were mess-free and looked very cool. They actually did glow in the dark slightly, but it was difficult to photograph.
I thought the 3D chalk was easy to use and it looked extremely cool when looking at the decorated eggs through the 3D glasses. My children, however, seemed to have trouble using the chalk. They all complained that the chalk would not show up for them like it did for me. I still have yet to figure out what was causing the difficulty for them.
Of all three kits, our children liked the messiest one the best . . . the Deggorating Doodles kit. They loved it even though the tips were soft and were not as precise as they would have liked and they got ink all over their hands. The ink from the markers did not dry immediately, so it would transfer onto other things when the egg was handled or put down. Also, the ink would still be wet on the stencils and would transfer onto the egg of the next user. Even when I was trying my hand at using the markers and stencils, I had a hard time being neat even though I was ever-so careful. Still, my children loved using the markers, which really were not that messy when compared to using paint and glue. I guess when you are choosing your kits, you will need to consider that what is fun for an adult is not necessarily fun for a child and vice versa.
Visit PaasEasterEggs.com and PAAS on Facebook to view the entire line of egg decorating kits. They usually retail for $2.99 and up and you can find PAAS kits at your local supermarket, drug store, and big box stores.
Thank you to PAAS for providing complimentary product samples for us to base this review upon.
