Learn how to make your own chalk-painted plastic eggs. Quickly turn those old plastic Easter eggs into pretty, neutral, spring decor. These budget-friendly, simple eggs are perfect for your farmhouse, rustic, or neutral home.
Over the years my kids have accumulated a lot of plastic eggs at Easter. We’ve bought some of them for egg hunts and to fill with treats for their Easter baskets.
But.
Every time there was an egg hunt at church, or school, or at their grandparents’ homes, or in the neighborhood, or at a friend’s house? The plastic eggs seemed to spawn. And if you multiply those eggs times three kids?
Well.
Let’s just say we have way more than we need…
I love the new trend for spring decorating using softer, more natural colors. In fact, I almost bought some packages of eggs that were the true colors of eggs: dusty blue, green, cream, and brown. With speckles. Swoon!
Some pretty twine-wrapped eggs almost came home with me that day too! Instead, I learned to make my own jute-wrapped eggs. Go see my “Pinterest fail” versions and learn my trick to easily make your own! Go ahead and look and laugh at my pathetic first tries, I’ll wait!
Getting back to the neutral eggs, I wondered if chalk paint would work to give them the same kind of look?
Spoiler alert: it does!
For your convenience, I’ve included links to items used in this post. You can read our full disclosure policy here.
How to paint plastic eggs
Here’s what you’ll need to make your own painted plastic eggs:
- Plastic eggs
- Chalk paint in a variety of colors
- Foam brushes (ideally one brush per color)
- Wood skewers
- Dry florist foam (did you know you can get this at the dollar store?!)
- Black chalk paint
- Stiff paint brush or toothbrush
- Sharp scissors
Prepping the plastic eggs to be painted
Confession time: I don’t really like getting my hands messy. So I put my plastic eggs on wooden skewers. They’re the perfect handle!
However, even if you do like getting messy hands, you’ll probably really like using the skewers. They help you to paint the entire egg at once and make it super easy to let them dry without touching anything.
Just poke the other end of the skewer into a piece of floral foam to let them dry! I buy my foam from the dollar store, but there’s a link above if you can’t easily get to a store.
The newer plastic eggs all have holes in each half which are perfect for inserting the wood skewer. If you’ve got some vintage eggs, you’ll need a small sharp tool to poke a hole for your skewer.
I also like to clip off the little bit of plastic that holds the two halves together. This is optional, but I didn’t want those little bits poking out of my finished eggs.
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Painting the plastic eggs
Once you have your eggs ready to go, the painting is super easy! I painted more than a dozen in less than 30 minutes.
I like to pour a little bit of paint onto a paper plate. This makes it easy if you want to mix together paints for a custom color.
The great part about chalk paint is it adheres to just about any kind of surface with zero preparation. That’s my kind of project! I did end up giving my plastic eggs two coats of paint for the white and cream eggs.
Giving your painted plastic eggs speckles
Not all eggs have speckles, so this step is optional. However, I felt like the painted plastic eggs needed a little something extra. Especially the ones that had a texture pattern on them! Those patterned ones got tucked in as filler on the bottom of a tiered tray because they never looked quite right. LOL
Chalk paint dries super fast, so you can add the speckles almost as soon as you’re done painting the eggs. I did this part outside because I didn’t want to spatter paint in my house.
I used black chalk paint I had leftover from painting my marble fireplace for the speckles. If you want to get really crafty, you could mix up some custom speckles by adding a little bit of black to the colors of chalk paint you used for the eggs.
I tested my speckling skillzzz on unpainted plastic eggs. I didn’t want to mess up my good ones!
Unfortunately, I didn’t really like how it looked when I spattered the paint onto the eggs. Some of the spots of paint were way too big and raised. I’ve seen some people have better success using a stiff bristled toothbrush. But I didn’t have one on hand, so I changed things up.
I used a dry brush stippling technique to make the speckles. Dip just the tip of the paintbrush into the paint, then tap off the excess on a piece of cardboard until the brush is nearly dry. Then gently tap the brush over the eggs to give tiny little speckles.
It’s not perfect, but the speckles do add a little something extra to the eggs. If I’d been a little less impatient, I would’ve made the custom speckle colors.
Overall, I really love how these chalk-painted plastic eggs look in my home! I used some to make a tiered tray for Easter.
And the rest are nestled in a bed of paper grass in a chippy white painted dough bowl in my foyer.
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This was such an easy craft project! I will definitely do this again and play around with the speckling, so stay tuned. If you have any questions about this project, feel free to contact me here, or leave a comment below! Follow us over on Instagram and Facebook to see everything we’re up to.
More Posts You May Enjoy:
- Spring dining room: Simple neutral tablescape
- Simple neutral Spring home tour
- How to decorate your fireplace for Spring and Summer
- Jute-wrapped eggs simple DIY project
- Decorating farmhouse trays for Spring
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