Easter Egg Potato Prints

I am learning, very slowly, that if you really want to do neat tutorials online, you have to do them early. But I don't want to spend 3 weeks with my kids doing Easter crafts before Easter gets here. I want to rejoice in the holiday ON the holiday (or the week of, at least) and so I run into a dilemma. Do I post them for next March as I do them the week of? Or do I hope and pray there are others like me that think that last minute crafts are the best? lol...

This one is the second.

Easter Egg Potato Prints

You need:

Two potatoes

A knife

straws, cookie cutters, etc.

washable paint

paper (we used heavy packing paper)

small trays to set the paint in (I used yogurt lids, but meat trays would work great!)

a few willing children (being artistic is completely optional)

1) First off... cut the potatoes in half. You need to leave one potato half complete for the 'body' of the egg. Then you have the other three potato halves to use for the egg decorations.

2) For polka dots, I used several straws, placed them into the potato and used my knife to cut around them so that all that was left was the polka dots for the stamp part:

3) For a flower I placed a small cookie cutter in the center of the potato half, and cut around it with the knife:

4) For a crazy stripe I just used the knife to cut a shape into the potato, like this:

I had 11 kids at my house today, ranging in ages from 3 to 13 and they all loved this project. Some of them made 'dyed eggs' and then decorated those, others made white eggs, or brown eggs (all of us have chickens or have had them recently) and decorated those.

It was really cute and they turned out so great!

My best friend took this picture while helping me set up my camera... I think it looks just like a Mario "get big" Mushroom... what do you think?