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Easter

Ashley’s Cupcake Wreath

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Last summer I was at a backyard barbecue when I spotted a little girl. While the other children were playing hide and seek indoors, she sat happily on a bench by herself, blowing bubbles, singing a song from the top of her head. I don’t recall the exact tune but it was something about a sand castle and mustard bottles. She wore glittered shoes, a polka dot dress and a tiara.

After introducing myself and complementing her on her musical stylings, I asked her why she was wearing a tiara. Looking up from her bubble wand, she stared me straight in the eye and answered, rather proudly, “Because I can.”

Clearly, I had to meet this child’s mother.

Since then I have so enjoyed getting to know her mom, Ashley, who is All Kinds of Crafty. Seriously, the woman lives with jellybean colored walls (!!!) Until Ashley starts a blog, she has been kind enough to share a couple of her projects with me, including her version of the Easter wreath I posted last week. 

Folks, seriously, how cool is this?

I think I like her version better than the original. It’s so fun. So happy looking. The colors. The patterns. THE TINKER TAPE.

Perhaps this is an Easter project but it feels a bit like a birthday party. Or Mardi Gras. Or Cinco De Mayo. Or Tuesday. Why should we hang a cupcake wreath on our doors every Tuesday?

Because we can.

   

Friday Flowers: Coffee Filter Easter Baskets in Bloom

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Buck teeth: Check.

Cotton tail: Check.

Easter basket: Check.

The Easter bunny has come to town. Woot! Woot!

OK, can we just agree that Easter is the best holiday?

Second only to National Root Beer Float Day, perhaps.

And Lola’s birthday, of course.

And the day the dollar store restocks.

That is, indeed, a truly a extraordinary day.

The best part about Easter hoopla has got to be Easter baskets.

Chocolate. Chickens. Glittering Eggs. Toys. Socks.

Did your mother put socks in your Easter basket?

Mine sure did.

One time someone gave me a basket with teal blue press-on fingernails.

Obviously, it was awesome.

Another time I gave someone an Easter basket with a bottle of Jack Daniels dressed as a bunny.

Get it? It was a Jack Rabbit. Haha.

OK, OK, OK, it seemed funnier when I was 23. I guess everything seems funny when you’re 23. Then again, hard liquor dressed as a small furry animal is always going to be pretty friggin nifty.

Must give credit where credit is due, I got the idea for these baskets from these other baskets at World Market. Their baskets look sort of like large felt daisies. Very cute. Decided that instant I was going to make something similar, but, as much as I like them, something about felt feels very wintery to me, so I used coffee filters instead. Guess I use coffee filters for everything. Someone less lazy than me should try making these from fabric or junk mail or something. Post it and let me know how it works out.

Materials

  • 12 yellow coffee filters*
  • 3 green coffee filters
  • 1 disposable bowl. Paper cups and tupperware containers work great too.
  • 10″ plastic coated electronic chord (mine came from my old telephone….I’ll bet you have something laying around the house that will get the job done!
  • Hot glue**

* You can dye coffee filters many ways. If you can dye eggs, you can dye coffee filters the same way. You can also just dunk them in a bowl that is 1 part acrylic paint to 9 parts water. Or use markers. Decide fir yourself. Quantity will vary, depending on the size of the base container.

**You can swap hot glue for white glue and use clothespins to clamp in place as it dries, but hot glue is easier. I’ll do a kid-friendly version of this without hot glue on Wednesday. Stay tuned.

Use two coffee filters to cover the edges of the bowl, then fold and snip jagged edges along the rim of any remaining filters, similar to cutting snowflakes. I like to cute 3-5 filters at a time.

Separate filters and pinch them them individually, forming loose fan shapes. Use hot glue to adhere to the inner rim of the bowl.

After completing the inner rim of the bowl, flip your bowl and repeat along the outer rim. Tip: avoid crushing the petals by flipping the bowl onto a large soup can.


Use one of the green coffee filters to cover the bottom of the bowl, forming the base of the flower. Cut the remaining green filters into 1″ strips and adhere to the telephone chord. Tuck in some leaves or just for fun.


Place one large yellow filter in the bottom and fill it with candy. Ta Da! You are ready to go!

You could also add a little accent flower if you like. Makes it seem slightly less Easter-ish. Like something you could keep out on your cadenza all year round to gather mail. Man, penny saver coupons never looked so good!


Or be traditional and fill it with eggs. Not as snazzy as chocolate and Jack Daniels but I give you props for being all traditional and stuff.

Come back on Wednesday and I’ll show you an easy, kid-friendly way to make a little tiny Easter basket like this purple one here. It’s so cute, you’ll want to eat your hand.

The World’s Easiest and Foofiest Easter Wreath

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Y’all are going to get really tired of me making everything all pink and green and flouncy from now until Easter. Forgive me. I can’t help it. It’s a holiday marked by small furry creatures and ginormous hats. It just doesn’t get any better than this!

Now check out my Easter wreath. Yes, it’s a bit foofy, even for me, but sometimes a little foof is a good thing! And it was ridiculously easy. All you need is a few dozen cucake liners, coffee filters, and a stapler.

Start by trimming coffee filters into a flower shapes, then layer on three or four cupcake liners. Staple twice in the middle.

PS: Of the many, many time I have made stuff out of cupckae liners, this is is the first time I have implemented a stapler. But now, after seeing Camilla do it, I feel so stupid I never tried it before. Far easier than anything I ever did with glue or pipe cleaners. Camilla, you’re a genius! Y’all have to check out her Easter wreath –I have a box of cocktail umbrellas waiting to go 🙂

After stapling, pinch up the center cupcake liner, followed by the others, working from the outside in.

Keep going until you have enough flowers t cover your base. It took 40 flowers to cover my 14″ foam wreath base with a thick, full covering. I’ll bet you could do it with 20, or even less.

Attach the them to the wreath with pearl-head pins, that way you can pull them out and reuse the wreath base and flowers another time. I think these flowers might end up on a post-Easter lampshade or something. It’s too pretty to stuff in a closet with the eggs. Why can’t we have Easter year round?


Holy crap!

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Photo Courtesy of eierbaum-saalfeld.de
I’m big on egg trees. Always have been. They are a big part of my spring festiveness (yes, that’s a real word) and I’m usually rather proud of the end result. There is nothing I love more than turning a scrawny branch into a candy colored ballgown of Eastery goodness. It’s my thing.
With that in mind, you can imagine how inferior I’m feeling after discovering Mr. Volkner Kraft’s egg tree in Saalfeld, Germany. As of last year, there were 9,500 eggs hanging on display. And it’s still growing.
Holy crap!
 

Cupcake Flower Easter Basket and the Revenge of Chocolate Karma

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I have a confession to make.

Three years ago I stole a chocolate Cadbury bunny from a small child.

By stole, I mean, I quietly removed it from his mother’s shopping cart at Target while she was turned in the opposite direction.

Look, I’m not proud of my actions. I’m certainly not in the habit of removing things from other people’s carts, especially while a drooling toddler looks on from the front basket, but it was the Saturday before Easter and there were no more Cadbury bunnies on the shelf.

There would be no more chocolate bunnies UNTIL NEXT EASTER.

Do you hear me? A WHOLE YEAR PEOPLE.

It was a now or never, fight or flight situation.

I needed that bunny.

Later, as I sat there eating that bunny in the Target parking lot later that night, I thought to myself…. You’re a grown woman. This holiday is a celebration for kids and families and churches and wholesome stuff like that. Think about it; Is this chocolate bunny really worth stealing from a small child?

Answer: Duh.

Of course, Karma, the ever-faithful mistress of Truth, decided to seek her revenge this weekend. As I once again strolled the Easter isle at Target I arrived just in time to watch a little boy, probably around 8 years or so, struggle to reach the last Cadburry bunny at the rear of a very high shelf.

No joke. What are the chances? I know, right? Karma. Or worse: Chocolate Karma.

Plagued with three-year-old guilt, I assisted in reaching the bunny and placed it in his hands. Now, I could have taken it and made a run for it, but instead I gave it to him. I know, right? Sainthood.

With no more Cadburry bunnies on the shelf I settled for a bag of Cadbury eggs and the Lindt chocolate bunny featured here. Lindt is good chocolate too. Not Steal-from-a-small-child Good, but pleasant enough to photograph.

The flowers are made from cupcake flowers (click here for full tutorial). It came out nicer than I suspected. It would look nicer with a Cadbury bunny in the middle, but these are the sacrifices I make. For the children, you know.

Decorating the basket is easy. Just twist the cupcake flowers directly on to the basket until you feel it looks like a proper church hat. I don’t like messy tails and twister pieces showing. Luckily it’s easy to wrap some seam binding around the ugly bits.


These eggs are from ten years ago when I did a chocolate Easter tree. All the eggs were made of real chocolate.

And yes, I said chocolate tree. And you’re right, it was magnificent.

Most of the eggs got eaten right off the tree, except these ones, which are just superficially decorated with real chocolate in hopes I would not eat them in mid-November chocolate craving rage they would last . Yes, you heard right, real ten-year-old chocolate. I took plastic eggs from the store, painted them various shades of chocolate brown, then glued mini chocolate chips all other. Two layers of outdoor varnish, and look, still kicking!  They are way to heavy to heavy to hang on the tree, but they look nice in the base of the annual Easter basket. The chocolate chips are a little speckled, but amazingly, they have held up beautifully.

And who needs to buy Easter grass when you have colorful trimmings from making coffee filter flowers. Yes, I even keep my craft coffee filter scraps. They are too pretty to throw away.

Lola decided she wanted to be the chocolate bunny  in the middle of this year’s Easter basket. It didn’t go so well. Now working on a bigger basket to accommodate. Stay tuned!

   
 

Friday Flowers: Cupcake Flowers

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Good news: the grocery store finally started carrying giant chocolate bunnies. 
You know what that means? 
Giant chocolate bunny for dinner  Spring is finally here!
It’s been a while since I did a Friday Flower post. This winter has been too cold and gloomy to think of such pleasantries. But things are different now and I’m in the mood for flowers!
Y’all know how much I love me some cupcake liners. And even though there are some seriously nifty cupcake flowers out on the internet already (this one from Iceing Designs is my particular favorite!)…I thought I would do my own version. These are very easy, kid-friendly, and they scream HELLO EASTER!
Materials
  • Various cupcake liners. Or muffin liners. Or nut cups. Or candy cups. Or coffee filters. Any ruffly cup things will do the job.
  • Pipe cleaners.
  • Beads with holes large enough to easily accommodate pipe cleaners.
  • Faux flowers. You could snip from fabric if you are anti-faux flower.
  • Something pointy like an extacto knife or an awl.
Disassemble the faux flowers, exposing the hole in the center (or snip your own, just be sure it is fabric, not paper –you need something fabric as a buffer between the bead and the paper liners or they will tear too easily. Don’t worry, this will make sense in a minute.)
Stack up three cupcake liners in order of size, then use something pointy to make two small holes, roughly 1cm apart.
Thread the pipe cleaner through the bead, followed by the flower, then the two holes in the cupcake liner, pulling all the components together.
On the reverse, pinch the base of the flower and give it a good twist. The fabric flower in teh middle should stabilize it enough to prevent the liners from ripping, but don’t get too aggressive. Cupcake liners like to be handled nicely 🙂
use one of the pipe cleaner stems to wrap around the base, then secure with a twist.
That’s it! Gently pull back the petals, working from the outside inward.
Fluff and repeat! You can churn out a bunch of these in no time at all. Wrap the flowers around wires or dowels to display in a vase, or just use the wire to wrap them around everyday objects. I keep a couple tied onto the wire basket I use to store onions. 
And listen, if my onions like these cupcake flowers, I’m pretty sure someone you know will like them too. Try them out for yourself!

 Stay Tuned…Monday I’ll show you my Cupcake flower Easter basket. Wahoo!