Homemade Bird Eggs

Look at these lovely little nests and eggs we made to celebrate spring!

I blogged back in April about making the nests, but I thought I should show the finished nests with their pretty blue eggs.

My son and I talked about making salt dough eggs to put into the nests. He immediately thought that each nest should have three eggs. Apparently a book he read at preschool showed a robin's nest that had three eggs, and therefore his nests had to have three eggs in each.

I suggested just one large egg per nest but he persisted that each needed three. So I gave him the abacus to figure out how many eggs we would need to make. (Secretly I thought that this would make him realize it was more eggs than we wanted to make...but instead it inspired him to create such a large number of eggs.) "Wow, we are going to need a lot of salt dough because we need 48 eggs!" 

Our basic salt dough recipe:

The best part of this project is that my son took the lead. He had a plan as to what the nests should look like and how many eggs they needed. It's fun to let him take charge and support his ideas!

Ingredients: 4 cups all-purpose flour, 1 cup salt, and 1 ½ cups warm water.

• Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.
• Mix flour and salt well. Gradually add water, stirring with a large spoon. Finish mixing with hands. Knead until soft and pliable.
• Roll small pieces of dough into an egg shape.Place on cookie sheets. Bake until hard, about 1 to 1 ½ hours, depending on the thickness of the eggs.
• To color the eggs we used a liquid watercolor paint. We didn't achieve a true robin's egg blue but the color was very vibrant!.