Cub Scouts have been painting egg shells.
This time of year many communities celebrate the start of Spring or celebrate religious or cultural events at this time by decorating eggs. We looked at some egg decorations from 60,000 years ago to today; about the historical markings on different eggs and thought about the different animals who lay eggs. For Inspiration, we looked at decorated eggs from the following web entries (via printout):
- Wikipedia Egg Decorating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_decorating
- Some Really old egg decoratin in South Africa http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8544332.stm
- Sham El Nessim https://scoopempire.com/the-origins-of-egypts-oldest-celebration-sham-el-nessim/
- Kalti Paarti https://australian.museum/learn/cultures/atsi-collection/cultural-objects/kalti-paarti-introduction/
- Eggs in Slavic Culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_decorating_in_Slavic_culture
- Easter Eggs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg
- and Washi Paper Eggs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washi_egg
In our last two sessions we first blew some eggs, using a pump to add air into an egg and gently increasing the pressure to push out egg innards out through a hole carefully made at the bottom. In this session we collected the egg contents and made omelettes in a bag. This makes a really good camping ‘omelette’ that slips right out of the bag it’s cooked in (maybe even carried in) and the cooking pans only need to boil water, so no need to scrape/wash burnt egg of the bottom of a billy can. We also looked at vegan-non egg alternatives as one of our number cannot eat egg: here we made something similar using Gram Flour.
All credit to the Cub Scouts for tasting and in most cases enjoying their own omelettes with cheese and tomato ketchup. (To be fair Akela’s pre-session tests with gram flour omelette making were better—and tastier—when making a kind of savoury pancake, rather than the boil in the bag omelette.)
For the second week, after our egg shells had been washed and dried, we decorated them used sharpies with inspiration from the websites above. Just look at the results!
We had all sorts of artistic eggspressions; from the world of nature right through to modern art worthy of the Turner Prize!
