DIY Treat-Filled Paper Easter Eggs To Send To Your Daughters in College

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

These treat-filled paper Easter eggs are a low-waste way to celebrate!

Of COURSE I still make my college kids Easter baskets! I mean, they may be away at school and having grown-up adventures, but they still like candy and LEGOs!

However, while even plastic Easter eggs are okay for a kid’s Easter basket, since they’re used year after year, I can’t get behind mailing high-waste holiday packaging to someone living in a dorm room. I don’t want to spend the money and space mailing it, and my kids don’t want to figure out what to do with it after the two seconds it takes to open it and eat the candy.

My favorite solution? Upcycled and easily recyclable PAPER!!!

It comes entirely from my stash (which means it’s something I’m actively trying to get rid of, ahem–recovering craft supply hoarder checking in!), it’s lightweight and easy to mail, and the kids can pop it into the recycling, sans guilt.

Here’s what you’ll need to craft your own treat-filled, guilt-free, easily recyclable paper Easter eggs:

Materials

• paper. The papers I upcycled for this project are pretty enough to be Easter eggs, but it honestly doesn’t even matter if they’re ugly because the important part is the candy! I used old scrapbook paper and vintage wallpaper samples, but I also had some old sheet music that I was eyeing. Book pages would be cute, or if you’ve got little kids at home, put them to work coloring in some Easter egg designs onto white paper.
• candy. Choose something that won’t get stale, if you’re also putting these into a care package. Jellybeans are a good choice, although just between us, I didn’t really like the ones you can see in the photos. I thought they’d taste like gummy clusters, darn it! Starburst jellybeans forever!
• needle and thread. I used my sewing machine for all the stitching in this project, but it could also easily be hand-stitched. A running stitch would work great!

Step 1: Trace an Easter egg template.

You can of course hand-draw an Easter egg template, but I generally just do a Google Image search. Place a piece of white paper directly onto the screen over the image you’d like to trace, and then trace it in pencil. Don’t use a pen or marker, no matter what, because we don’t want marker on our computer screens!

The template I’m using in this project is 5″ long, which is just the right size to comfortably hold 20 jellybeans. If you want to put in a different amount of treats, size up or down accordingly.

Step 2: Cut two paper Easter egg pieces per Easter egg.

Trace your template onto paper, then cut two paper Easter eggs for each finished Easter egg that you want to have.

The image above contains some Easter eggs made of scrapbook paper and some of vintage wallpaper samples.

Step 3: Sew the eggs almost all the way around.

If you’re sewing this on a machine, switch to an older needle since sewing through paper doesn’t do a sewing machine needle any favors. Set your machine to its longest straight stitch. If you’re hand-sewing, any thread works, but embroidery floss is very pretty!

Put the two Easter egg pieces together PRETTY SIDES OUT! I forgot to do this once and was very annoyed at myself, grr.

Start near the end of one of the longer sides, then sew a scant 1/4″ stitch about 75% of the way around the egg. Don’t backstitch at the start or end of your stitch line, since in my experience this tends to tear, or at least wrinkle, the paper.

Stop your line of stitching near the top of that same long edge where you started, giving yourself plenty of room to fill the Easter egg with treats. Again, don’t backstitch, but instead just gently remove the Easter egg from the machine.

Step 4: Fill the Easter egg with treats.

The stitched ends that make the opening will be a little unstable without the backstitching, so just be mindful as you gently open up the Easter egg and fill it with candies. There’s enough candy inside when the Easter egg looks full but you can still put the paper back together at the opening neatly. If the Easter egg is overstuffed, the paper will overlap unevenly, so just take candy out piece by piece until the opening is smooth.

Step 5: Finish sewing the Easter egg closed.

Carefully put the two pieces of Easter egg back together evenly, then finish sewing it closed. You’ll reinforce those unstable thread ends by starting your stitching several stitches before the opening, and ending it several stitches after the opening.

Your paper Easter eggs are now so pretty, and they hold so many nice treats!

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How to Make a Cardboard Shield from Upcycled Cardboard

 

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World!

Have a little knight in training at home?

It takes just a few minutes to make your favorite knight her very own shield out of recycled cardboard. A cardboard shield is cheaper than even a cheap-o plastic toy shield, doesn't junk up the environment, and best of all--your child can decorate it herself!

These shields are so quick and easy to make that you don't have to limit your kid to just one; we made the shields in these photos as a party activity at my child's dragon-themed ninth birthday party, constructing them ahead of time and letting the party guests paint them. The shields were a hit, and combined with balloon swords and another giant recycled cardboard box as a paint-and-play castle, there was a LOT of swordplay and castle defending and dragon taming at the party.

Here's how to make your own:

1. Source some cardboard. The shields themselves should be made from sturdy cardboard, ideally corrugated or similar. The band in the back should be made from thin, bendy cardboard.

We obtained the cardboard used to make our shields (as well as our big box castle!) from the food pantry where we volunteer, and used old cardboard record album covers for the bands. If you don't have a handy source for obtaining cardboard, check out Freecycle or your local recycling center.

2. Cut out the shields. Fortunately, shields have a very simple form--for inspiration, do a Google Image search and choose your favorite type. If you're just making one or two shields, you can freehand your shield's shape directly onto the cardboard, but if you're making enough shields to supply a birthday party full of little knights, you may want to draw and cut out a template to trace.

Cut out the shields using a box knife.

3. Add a band to the back. Cut a rectangle out of the thin, bendy cardboard that's approximately 2" wide and 1.5 times the width of the shield. Staple it to the back of the shield, and your knight will have something to hold onto!

4. Paint and decorate. To turn shield decorating into a party activity, I set out the finished cardboard shields and a large set of tempera paint, BioColor paint, and paintbrushes. As kids arrived, they were invited to paint their shield, have my partner make them a balloon sword, help paint the giant cardboard castle, or just play. Every kid opted to paint a shield first thing.

Fortunately, the morning was warm and sunny, so as the kids finished their shields, I set them to dry on the grass, and it didn't take long for their owners to recollect them and add them into their play.

To make this an even more eco-friendly project, opt for DIY cardboard swords as well as shields--although you can't whack a kid across the head with a cardboard sword quite like you can with a balloon sword, it will make for far fewer little balloon pieces to pick up and throw away afterwards.

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Would You Like Me To Sew You A Word? Because I Have Alphabet Quilt Block Patterns Now and I Am Unstoppable.

Spelling Bee by Lori Holt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have long wanted a good alphabet quilt block pattern, mostly for monogramming and personalizing things, but I don’t want to learn foundation paper piecing (yet! I’m sure the day is coming!), and the online patterns that I’ve tried work, but they’re usually sort of blocky and/or the sizing is uneven, etc.

This book is genuinely exactly what I wanted.

The letter blocks in two sizes, 6” and 12”, are perfect--although, fine, I would also like them in 20” so that I can monogram giant pillows, but I understand the scale of that would quickly become maniacal. And I’m just saying that if the author also handed patterns for 4” blocks to me I wouldn’t say no, but on the whole I can do pretty much anything I want to do with 6 inches and 12 inches.

I had no issue piecing this percent sign block and assembling my table runner, but for some reason last night I became absolutely consumed with the idea that I'd put it in sideways, so the diagonal went the wrong way and the circles were on the wrong sides. They are NOT, the block is perfect, but I will absolutely check 14 more times and then Google it to double-check and then worry that Google is wrong and I don't know what I'm supposed to do about that but just give up, I guess. 

This is the direction a percent sign goes, right?

RIGHT?!?

I sometimes have a hard time paying attention to pattern instructions, because I’d rather just get the gist and then go off on my own and likely as not mess stuff up, but fortunately the instructions for each letter block are actually quite short, so even I could generally manage to follow them. I only had to seam rip a couple of things in my most recent project, and that was only because I was paying attention to hockey on TV and not what I was doing. The Boston Fleet are having an AWESOME season!

Seriously, though--this IS how a percent sign goes, right?

I would have liked some guidance on sashing widths that would make proper spacing between letters and words (although honestly, it’s probably in there and I just wasn’t paying attention), and on good border widths, but with a little trial and error I figured out that a 1” piece (.5” finished) is perfect between letters--

and I used 2.5” (2” finished) between words. I want to make multiple lines of text in my next project, so I’m thinking 2.5” again just to make the cutting more efficient. But maybe I should do 2”?

I’ll probably double-check the book before I decide, ahem.

Moveable alphabets are things, like Base 10 blocks, number patterns, and rainbow order, that please me greatly--they're just so organized and satisfying!--and I always like finding new ways to manipulate them. I still dream fondly of that wool felt moveable alphabet that I sewed for my young niece one Christmas--all the letters! All the colors! You could spell words with the letters! And the words would be different colors! So you will understand completely when I tell you that I am VERY excited to make a wall quilt that has my favorite Wilbur Wright quote on it. 

And then maybe a set of couch pillows with all the family's monograms.

Oh, and would the younger kid and her roommates next year like to have matching monogrammed throw pillows for their beds? The kid actually LOATHES it when I craft for her friends, because apparently nobody's else's parents put random hand-sewn gifts for strangers in their child's care packages and being unlike others is apparently something that we are meant to care about now and also a sign that I "do too much," but surely she'd come around for matching monogrammed throw pillows! And maybe just one singular bunting with their college name on it for their common room? And then maybe little quilted hangings with each of their names on it for their bedroom doors?

Okay, fine, yes, I DO hear myself here, and I do see where possibly just very potentially that "doing too much" accusation is perhaps coming from.

Sooo... just the throw pillows and the bunting, then?

P.S. View all my reviews

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I Get to Enjoy My Quilted St. Patrick's Day Table Runner for 30 Hours Before I Have To Put It Away

One year ago, I had the idea to make a table runner for St. Patrick's Day using a deep cut from my Ancestry DNA test. My family has been in America for shockingly long considering how poor we still are. You'd think that people who were in the country before it became a country would have built up some kind of generational wealth by now, but I guess my people were too busy subsistence farming in the asshole parts of Kentucky and Arkansas to enslave other people's ancestors or steal land from the indigenous populations. I'd tell you that it's nice not to have that history of wrongs on my conscience, but somehow they all ended up fighting on the wrong side of the Civil War anyway, sigh.

Anyway, before they lived life in America working all the least profitable vocations and never buying any good land, all my ancestors came from around the Great Britain-ish area. I've got at least a couple of ancestors who emigrated in the early 1700s from Wiltshire, which you know I find super exciting because they knew Stonehenge! I know of a couple more ancestors who came from York, which tracks because Ancestry says about 22% of my DNA comes from northeast England. My DNA as a whole, according to Ancestry, is basically an amalgamation of the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes, with a few Celts thrown in. Ancestry says I'm 6% Welsh, which in my mind perfectly explains how I picked up Middle Welsh so easily in grad school (I haven't read it since, but we don't need to talk about that part) and 11% Irish.  

I've never tried my hand at Irish Gaelic, but my heart tells me that I'd also pick it up super quickly. I am not taking questions about this statement at this time.

The Welsh lineage has yet to reveal itself in my family tree, but the Irish part does track, since I can trace a couple of McClanahans who emigrated from County Tyrone in Ireland way back in the 1600s. Congratulations on missing the Potato Famine, guys, but you literally landed in Virginia, so why the hell did your grandkids decide to move to a stupid rocky mountain in Arkansas and cosplay famine living?

I say from the middle of bumfuck Indiana, where I own approximately 6 acres of property that tries very hard to be a wetland, including a 1,000 square foot house that tries very hard to fall apart at the seams at all times. Literally--I got up yesterday morning to discover that one of the bathroom floor tiles--WHICH IS PRACTICALLY BRAND NEW!!!--had worked itself loose, and there's a section of the family room floor--ALSO PRACTICALLY BRAND NEW!!!--abutting an outside wall that has clear signs of water damage that mysteriously just appeared one day. It's almost like having a whole entire giant elm tree fall right on top of your house is just generally bad for it!

FYI for the future when I one day need to try to sell this money pit: I HAVE NO KNOWLEDGE OF ANY FOUNDATION ISSUES. Also, I'll for sure be selling this place as-is. I don't want to have to replace the terrible windows, there's definitely something squirrely with the septic system but it still works fine so I'm just ignoring it, and I think there's a human grave about ten feet from the back deck.

ANYWAY. I had the idea for a St. Patricks' Day table runner themed on my Irish DNA a year ago, but as of a month ago, that project still looked like this:

This is Spelling Bee, by Lori Holt, and it is my favorite sewing book. I hog my library's copy, so if you want it you'll have to put it on hold.

Fortunately, I made plenty of progress after that, and two weeks ago, the project looked like this, all pieced and ready to be backed, quilted, and bound:

And then I got kind of busy at work, and then the younger kid came home for Spring Break, so I did not touch it again until yesterday, when I spent half the evening binging The Crown (I LOATHE how everyone treated poor Diana OMG! And damn but Scully goes hard on that Margaret Thatcher dialect!) and doing this:

And now I have this!

Because I did all the quilting literally yesterday, I didn't feel like going to the store for green thread and convinced myself that it's more eco-friendly and a better embodiment of my vow to boycott the economy to use the closest match that I had on hand, which was only slightly greenish and looks frankly pretty darn brown now that it's covering the table runner and can't be taken back:

Whatever. It's not perfect, but it's done, and that's much, much better!

Other than that--and, okay, the fact that I need to do probably one more round of quilting right there by the binding--I LOVE my new table runner. I'm obsessed with how the piecing turned out, and I like the look of the quilting (if not the color of the thread, dang it):

I'm not sure if the joke is too obscure, or just too stupid, though, because everyone I've tried to show my table runner to looks kind of nonplussed about it, and then when I explain the joke--("It's my Ancestry DNA! It says I'm 11% Irish!") they honestly somehow look even more nonplussed, but whatever. I think it's hilarious, and I'm the only voting demographic!

This morning, I got to start my St. Patrick's Day with my brand-new table runner, coffee and a chapter in my latest book--

--and then we hung out together while I worked and ate a delicious sandwich and drank more coffee:

Now excuse me, because I have seven more hours to enjoy my table runner before it's no longer St. Patrick's Day. Time to pour some Bailey's and listen to my B*Witched/Sinead O'Connor/Kingfishr/Pogues Spotify playlist!

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Two Off-Season Witch Hats, and One Perfectly Seasonal Table Runner

Somehow I do keep finding fancy fabric! I genuinely thought I'd used up all the kid's leftover Trashion/Refashion sewing stash, all those bits and pieces and scraps and the occasional completely untouched piece of thrifted formalware and scrounged luxury material... and then Mr. Craft Knife helped me organize my fabric one cold and slushy January day, and you'll never guess what I found stuffed at the bottom of one very overstuffed crate.

Ah, well. That navy satin formal dress and black lace T-shirt may not have ever made the cut (lol) as runway material, but it made a BEAUTIFUL witch hat!

I'm high-key obsessed with an interesting texture on top of something smooth and shiny, and I LOVE how two disparate pieces can look like they were made for each other:

And yay for Spring Break, when my favorite witch hat model became briefly available to model this latest hat for my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop!

Over the weekend, we swung by my favorite local arts and crafts thrift store because I really needed quilt batting. Alas that I did not find any there, and ended up having to buy some from Satan himself (I miss you, Joann!), buuut I did find two gallon-sized Ziplock bags full of THESE treasures!

I originally bought it just because the light blue colorway is the younger kid's class color at her school, so I'm always needing more baby blue for handmade gifts for her and her buddies, but that long piece is SO big, and so beautifully pieced--look at those perfect open seams!--

--that honestly, I'm probably going to save the smaller blocks for sewing for the kid, and turn that big block into another witch hat. It's just too perfect not to!

But here's what I needed that emergency quilt batting for!

The big kid got me one of those DNA kits for Christmas a couple of years ago, and while it turns out that, unsurprisingly, I am overall entirely from the UK region, there is apparently about 11% of me that's from the Irish part.

How appropriate for the season!

To piece the letter, number, and punctuation blocks, I used Spelling Bee, by Lori Holt, a book that I've actually been dying to use for over a year now, and I was NOT disappointed. The instructions are super easy to follow, and the couple of times I had to seam rip and try again were only because I was paying more attention to hockey on the TV than to what I was doing. I guessed a little about proper sashing width between the individual letters and between the words, but I think they look right:

I've got a couple more projects already cued up after I finish this table runner (fingers crossed it's at least before St. Patrick's Day!), but then I really want to try making a wall hanging featuring my favorite Wilbur Wright quote:

Not within a thousand years would man ever fly!

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All I Wanted To Do Was Go Look at Native American Pre-Columbian Earthworks in Ohio--So I Did! (Day 2)

What a difference a day makes!

The day before had been, if not quite Fool's Spring, mild enough that while packing for this overnight trip I'd considered not even bringing my coat, but eventually tossed it into the car anyway, because I'm no fool.

Well, I kind of *am* a fool these days--perimenopause brain fog is hitting me soooooo hard!--but not about the weather, at least.

But regardless, I was VERY glad to have that coat on this day, because look at the snow!

And, of course, the mound!

I promise that I DID do some non-mound activities with my daughter on this trip. We walked around Columbus, browsed a giant bookstore, ate hot chicken that bothered my stomach all night because I'm old, she got me to do an impression of Tor Thom doing the world's worst impression of Kip Grady from Game Changer, she egged me into griping so loudly about the Florida Panthers NHL team that a random guy glared at us (Panthers fans are everywhere, gag!), and just that morning I left my husband sleeping in our hotel room, picked her up from her apartment, and drove her back to our hotel to eat waffles and watch the Olympic men's hockey Gold medal match with me. I had not yet been outraged by the ham-handed misogyny of Team USA, and so we had a glorious time treating the breakfast buffet like a sports bar and cheering a bunch of jerks on to victory. 

But as much as I miss this kid when she's away at school, we're not really sit-and-yappers--you can yap just as well when you're poking around a pre-Columbian mound set in a cemetery next to an abandoned church!

I think it's so interesting to have a mound in a churchyard. The Fairmount Presbyterian Church was organized in 1834, so sayeth this History of Licking County.

I must warn you, though, that the same History of Licking County also sayeth this:

          The mound at Fairmont Church was a lookout mound and it was opened at one time but, I am told, it didn’t contain much. A number of smaller mounds like this have disappeared because of plowing fields over the years. In 1860 a keystone, a small triangular shaped sandstone engraved on both sides with Hebrew letters, was found in a mound near Newark. A Decalogue tablet was also unearthed in this mound. The tablet contained an abbreviated form of the Ten Commandments copied almost entirely from Exodus 20 in the Bible. For years, it was regarded as a hoax, but two Hebrew scholars along with some scientists confirmed it to be true. This tablet is seven inches long, black limestone, and was found in a circular light brown sandstone box with a whitish cement at the edges. The “Holy Stones” (five in number) were found near the intersection of Rt. 13 and Interstate 70 and at another location in Madison Township are still a subject of controversy, but scholars now think that perhaps people from the Mediterranean sea area reached this country in the days of the mound builders. This was long before Columbus came and these people left their messages carved on stones found in the Adena Burial Mounds as well as on rocks throughout North America.

 The author is referring to the Newark Holy Stones, which were a Big Deal back in the 1860s but have since gone the way of the various Oklahoma "runestones" that were talked about when I was a kid. 

Wait, it looks like some people are still talking about the Oklahoma runestones! I guess the Newark Holy Stones have just gone the way that the Oklahoma ones have NOT, lol!

Anyway... Vikings and runestones and Hebrew tablets and angel-human hybrids aside, I can't help but wonder what the congregation of the Fairmount Presbyterian Church thought about putting their Christian cemetery around that clearly pagan monument. It reminds me that when the Sutton Hoo ship burial was excavated, archaeologists discovered that people hundreds of years after that burial, long after all knowledge of it had passed, had been burying their dead around that then-mysterious mound, too. Did that feeling of awe that you get when looking at an ancient monument feel like religious sentiment? Was it the sense of ancient history and connection to the past that they thought translated well to a cemetery? Or did the place maybe just seem important, and that's what people wanted to connect with?

Regardless, it does make a lovely setting for photos, and I have to think that even though the mound is clearly being regularly mowed, it must fare better as cemetery property than it would have in a farm's acreage.

I need to come back here and take more photos on a sunny day!

Okay, remember this map of the earthworks as Squier and Davis saw them back in 1848?

So far, I'd seen most of what was remaining, i.e. the Great Circle (bottom right) and the Octagon and Circle (top left). But there's one little bit left that I hadn't yet seen...

Specifically, this bit!

The site is pretty depressing, bordered by a neighborhood, some kind of warehousy/factory-ish building, and a highway that, incidentally, used to be where the Ohio and Erie Canal ran instead:

The Goodwill at the top is where we got the kid a couple of shirts for job interviews and where I'm still pissed that I didn't buy two vintage green glass ashtrays. The kid said they were tacky, but what the hell does she know? The gas station in the middle is the closest parking I could find to the intersection of the street with the railroad tracks just north of it, which is where the semicircular earthwork on the Squier and Davis map was until it was demolished to make that street and railroad tracks. I hate civilization sometimes.

But still, we made the best of it and had a proper wander in that limited space:

The ridge that's running horizontally across the photo below is the top left edge of the square--I'm inside the square, and the kid is outside of it. The ridge in the background is the outside edge of the avenue that would have led straight towards that now-demolished semi-circle enclosure:

There's an opening where the two ridges meet, but I don't know if that's how it was originally. I also can't imagine that the original square and avenue earthworks were this short:

Because I'm curious and I waste my focus on that which is inconsequential, I even got into Google Earth's historical maps to see if maybe the ridges had looked different, taller or shorter or maybe more of the avenue was evident, 20 or so years ago, but it doesn't look like anything has really changed. And then I got VERY distracted looking for Kinzer Mound in South Salem, which is on the National Register of Historic Places but has its address redacted so I tried searching old Google Earth images, reddit and Facebook posts, property records for the name "Kinzer," etc., and never did find it, but I did waste almost two hours and there's apparently a cool covered bridge in South Salem that I now want to see, so there's that!

Here's me also checking Google Maps to see how far I'd have to walk and in what direction to get to the Great Circle and the Octagon:

The Great Circle is just about three-quarters of a mile from here, and the Octagon is about a mile and a half. Perhaps an adventure for another day!

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