Easter Eggs Designers Will Dye For.

There are an incredible amount of beautifully created and designed Easter Eggs out there. Nowadays people use everything from temporary tattoo papers, glitter, metallic paints and rub down letters to create eggciting ones. Several even use fabrics, etching, cut-out paper and appliques.

However, here are a few beauties that still use the good ol' dye you can make on your own.

If you've got the patience, you can make the fabulous Pantone dyed Easter Eggs shown at the beginning of this post that Jessica Jones of How About Orange created for 2012.


An homage to CMYK printing, Martha Stewart shows you how to make the beautiful three dot eggs shown above here.

Below are more stunning egg designs with links to tutorials from Martha Stewart:

above: learn how to make the scrambled lines and letter eggs here

above: learn how to make these lovely botanical silhouette dyed eggs here

above: learn how to make the square patterned eggs here

above: learn how to make the leaf and stenciled eggs here

above: learn how to make the stenciled eggs here

And for those of you who don't want to get your hands dirty, you can digitally create Easter eggs with this free Easter Egg Design app for the iPhone

And don't forget about the EggBot!


• Be sure to check out these 30 inspiring Easter Egg designs at Inspiration Feed

Eastern Eggs. Artist (& Robot) Decorated Wooden Eggs Whose Proceeds Aid Japan.

A few weeks ago, I introduced you to the Egg-Bot, a robotic kit that, with the addition of a fine point Sharpie or similarly sized pen, will decorate Easter eggs (or anything round, cylindrical and small) with art, design, words or logos for you.



Now, that very concept is being put to good and beneficial use by TBWA London who has created Eastern Eggs, an online site/ store selling wooden eggs decorated with the Egg-bot by various artists, with a portion of the proceeds going to Red Cross - Japan Tsunami Appeal.

Eastern Eggs features your choice of 14 different eggs, each illustrated by one of the following artists: Danke Schoen, Damien Weighill, Paul Pateman, Jan Kallwejt, Kristyna Litten, Matt Lyon, Nick Purser, Shin Tanaka, Tony Riff, Yehrin Tong or Ewen Stenhouse.





The suggested donation price is £10 for the eggs, £8 of which will go to the British Red Cross to aid Japan.
Buy them here.

Eggs + Sharpies And The Egg-Bot Will Do The Decorating Work For You.

Now you can impress the Easter Bunny with stylish and artfully decorated eggs created by the Egg-Bot, a robotic kit that is available for purchase.



The Eggbot is an open-source art robot that can draw on spherical or egg-shaped objects from the size of a ping pong ball to that of a small grapefruit-- roughly 1.25 to 4.25 inches in diameter (3 - 10 cm). The kit is based on the original design by Bruce Shapiro. The newest version, the "Egg-Bot 2.0," is a modern and friendly update, designed with the assistance of Bruce and his team.



The Eggbot is super adjustable, and is designed to draw on all kinds of things that are normally "impossible" to print on. Not just eggs but ping pong balls, light bulbs, mini pumpkins, and even things like wine glasses-- with a bit of work. In the photos, you can see just a few of the things that you can make with an eggbot: Incredible personalized golf balls, christmas ornaments, light bulbs, and (yes) eggs.




The Eggbot chassis is made of tough fiberglass, with integrated heat sinks for the included motors. The pen and egg motors are high-torque precision stepping motors, and the pen lift mechanism is a quiet and reliable servo motor.




The Eggbot kit is easy to assemble in a couple of hours, and only requires a couple of basic tools like miniature Phillips-head and flathead screwdrivers. You'll also need a recent-vintage computer with an available USB port (Mac, Windows or Linux), plus internet access to download assembly instructions and necessary software.



Eggbot w/ EBB Driver Board The Eggbot kit comes complete with a fully assembled and tested EiBotBoard v2.0 (EBB) USB interface/motor driver board. No soldering or programming are required.



The EBB allows your computer to directly control the stepper and servo motors. The onboard 16X microstepping driver chips along with the 200 step/revolution stepper motors give a combined resolution of 3200 steps/revolution in both axes. A universal-input plug-in power supply (9 V 1.5 A) is included with the Eggbot kit, as is a USB cable.

Basic operation is much like that of a printer driver: you import or make a drawing in Inkscape, and use the extensions to plot your drawing onto whatever object you've mounted in the Eggbot. It's all handled through an easy to use graphical user interface, and works cleanly on Mac, Windows and Linux.



The standard pen holder included with the EggBot kit is designed to fit various art pens including Sharpie Ultra Fine Point pens. However, it can actually fit almost any pen of similar size. If you want to use a pen that doesn't fit, the pen holder is made of wood and can be enlarged to suit your taste.

You can even fit a lot of things that aren't pens. One example: They'll be offering a diamond-point engraver tool as an optional add-on for the EggBot kit in the near future.


above: The Eggbot Logo on an Egg

If you have additional questions about the Eggbot kit, you may want to look at the Eggbot FAQ.

The Egg-Bot 2.0 kit was designed by Windell Oskay and Lenore Edman with extensive help from Bruce Shapiro and Brian Schmalz. The kit includes assembly and use instructions, open source hardware release documents and example plot files.

The Eggbot kit is available here.

PEEPS Peer Pressure! You Want Peeps Art? Here's Some Of The Best

above: this year's winner of the Washington Post Peep Show, Melissa Harvey's NightPeeps.

Okay Okay! I'm buckling under PEEPS Peer Pressure!

Based on the emails in my in box, everyone wants to see PEEPS art (which I was purposely tried avoiding with my previous post) .

But who am I to deny my readers? So... since so many of the contests have plenty horrendous and amateurish entries to sift through, I found a few really good ones from several different contests and from some flickr sets.

To start off with, The Washington Post has just announced the winner of their Third Annual PEEPs® show, Peeps Show III. Congratulations to Melissa Harvey of Arlington, Virgina for her winning Peep Diorama, NightPeeps (shown at the beginning of this post).

This year, there were lots of Political Peeps entries, Obama Peeps, Republican and Democratic Peeps, etc. There were also tons of American Idol Peeps and reality show entries and many based on popular tv shows like Heroes, LOST, Dexter and others. There were many versions of famous movie scenes and several recreations of big news events like the Hudson plane crash and the Octomom. A surprising amount of Mary Peepins and Peep On A Wire entries, too.

Here are some of my personal faves from the top 40 finalists from the 2009 entries into the "official" Peep Show III for the Washington Post:


above:Peepster's Kill Room by Chad Brobst & Stamatia Loverdos

Above: M.C. Escher's "RelativiPeep" by Mark Rivetti

above: Peeptown Cupcake by Jenna Huntsberger

above: Peep/Tuck by Jennifer Storozuk, Kathleen Lyons, Karen James

above: Steve Jobs Presents iPeep Nano by Sarah Kohari & Erin Mastrangelo

above: The Day The Earth Stood Peeped by Carl Cordell

You can see and vote for your personal favorite (The Peeple's Choice) from all the finalists (40 images) for the 2009 Washington Post Peep Show III here.


And some of my faves from the Twin Cities' Pioneer Press Contest (winners announced tomorrow). This was tough, there were lost of good entries into this Twin Cities Contest:

above: The Great Peepression by Jenny Updike

above: US Peepways by Gregg and Lisa Engas

above: iPeeps by Molkenbur & Canavan

above: Peepstock by Sara Marie Reinke and Tara Jordan.

above: The wreck of the Edmund Peepsgerald by Puliarf

above: two by two by Ruth Heyer

above: Peeps of the Carribean by Judy

above:Ch-ch-ch-Chia Peeps by Mary and Anne McComb

This year's winner of the 2009 Chicago Tribune's Peeps On Parade Contest:

Yet another peeps contest, whose 2009 finalists you can see is the Chicago Tribune's here


Some good Flickr Finds:

Be sure to see the University of Chicago's Peeple's Choice winners in a flickr set here, an example of which is shown above.

A few beauties from the Carroll Arts Center 1st Annual Peep Show Flickr set (admittedly from 2008):



detail:


detail:





And some other fab flickr finds:

Pink Pickled Peep:

found here on flickr.

Peeps Dress:

found here on flickr.

Okay, so there you have it. The Best Of The Prolific Preponderance Of Peeps Projects. Or My Personal Peep Picks.

If you didn't see the previous post about All Non Perishable Peeps Products For Purchase, see that here.

or check out last year's Peep Show winners here.