Artist Maggi Blue just made 72 dyed Easter eggs--that's four 18-packs of eggs. And she didn't do it for her six-year-old son. She is just a little cuckoo for brightly colored things. "What I'll do is go to Walmart and stand there in the egg decorating aisle and buy as many of those little packets of dye as I can, you know the PAAS kind. I just buy a ton of 'em, they're like two bucks, and that's the most fun for me. I don't even like Easter. I just like making eggs," she said.

She said she hard boiled half of them and "used a ton of vinegar," then dyed them and gave them to her parents, who will be organizing an Easter egg hunt on Sunday. The other half she poked a pin through and blew out the yolks so that the hollowed eggs sit like little rainbow colored jewels in their cardboard cartons.

It might sound crazy to make so many multi-colored eggs, but in Blue's Creativity Chronicles blog, there's a simple answer:

Rainbow Rhetoric

I’ve been thinking a lot about rainbows and why I am so attracted to them (and the way they represent the color spectrum as a whole) and why they sooth me so.

As a designer (and artist-type), it’s safe to say that I have always been attracted to color. The right color or combination of colors can make or break a design, a room, a meal - hell, my day. In the dead of winter (like today) with a gray, overcast sky and a vast dead brown dirty landscape, I find myself depressed in the absence of color.

I understand the psychology of color and that certain colors can elicit certain emotional responses (see some links below). For me, it’s my fascination with the entire spectrum together and in ROY G. BIV order and, more specifically - why does it make me so happy and self soothed. I love nothing better than creating a color wheel out of - well anything (as seen by the rainbow pancakes I made last week). I have the ideas swirling about other food color wheels, a color wheel based Easter egg tree…and on and on. One of my most cherished possessions is my large set of Pantone swatch books (and thankfully, as a designer, they were tax deductible - those suckers are stupid expensive).

Read more of her blog post here.

Asked what her plan was for the 36 eggs she had left, she answered, "I've got the rest of them sitting around my house and I don't know what I'm going to do with them!" she laughed.

Kay Stephens can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com