A Fun Way to Use Eggshells

I have accomplished a lot of creative things for the past couple of days, but I have prepared two books to be altered into art journals and I made eggshell mosaics. Gluing pages together is not an exciting thing to see, but the eggshell mosaic experiment is pretty neat. Being my first time, I would have done a few things differently. Even so, a nice look is almost foolproof.

A few people have asked me, what is an eggshell mosaic. It is pretty simple. You find a surface you want to cover, paint a basecoat on it, brush on an adhesive, and crush pieces of cleaned eggshells, outer side up,  onto the glue. When it is on the adhesive, you ca add more cracks by pressing down with a toothpick, skewer, or pencil eraser,  until it looks the way you want it to. You keep doing this until the surface is covered. When that is dry and you straighten the edges, use a dye, ink, or stain of some sort to create color. I used a felt pad to dab a magenta alcohol ink all over mine, then strayed with very strong coffee. That didn't quite do it for me, so I dabbed on some black acrylic ink, sprayed with alcohol, wiping off the excess. I kept playing with it until it looked the way I wanted it to.  What will happen is most of the color will sink into the cracks. The eggshells may be stained, depending on what types of inks or dyes you apply. When it is completely dry, coat with your favorite varnish. I would venture to say embossing would be a nice clear coat. I used 2 coats of Diamond Glaze.

Here are the results.

Overall, I am pleased with the outcome, but I would do some things differently:

• The surface I used was one that was painted in a way I didn't like. It would have been better had I did a nice coating of black paint. I ended up having to take a Black Sharpie to a lot of gaps because the color showed through and didn't look so nice. Sharpie will smear when varnishing, so be warned. It actually worked toward the effect here, but it is better to do it the easier way.
• The reason I had to use a Sharpie in the first place was because I did not completely cover my surface with eggshells. In the future, I will make sure that I do.
• I used a gel medium as my adhesive, which was extremely thick. I would not recommend using a pasty adhesive. It was a little icky. Instead, I will probably use a bit more than a thin coating of Elmer's glue in small patches. That way, there will be a minimum of fuss and the glue will not dry before you are finished with the eggshell. Completely covering each glued section with eggshell before moving on is a good way to avoid large gaps. 
• Whatever color you use on your piece, make sure it is very thin and watery. The acrylic ink was a bit thick, not the viscosity, but the pigment. It completely coated my surface. That is why I ended up spraying with some alcohol. When you do that, some of the ink may come off, so there is a lot of experimentation involved, not necessarily a bad thing. At one point, I thought it looked like a pink lizard! 
• If your surface is cardboard or paper, you will be able to cut it into shapes with scissors, but I would make sure they are in the shapes you want before moving on. I would be too nervous punching them or trying to cut with a slide paper cutter. run them through a slide cutter.

I think it would be super cute to make a flower out of thick paper covered with eggshell mosaic. I am not sure how I am going to use the ones I completed, but I am excited to do more. Everything I used was found around my house. and the base and eggshells were things that would have ended up in the trash. If I was feeling ambitious, I could have even made natural dyes from stuff in my kitchen. There are lots of instructions on the web for doing that. I like crafts that make me feel good about myself!