How to Make Embroidered Felt Easter Eggs--with a Secret Pocket for Surprises!

I HATE this pandemic staycation, but it's no lie that it's given me more time to work on Easter crafts, so there's that, I guess...

Also, handwork soothes my anxiety, gives me and the kids something constructive to focus on, and is something fun that we can do together to make some happy memories. So there's that, I guess!

This particular project also fills an actual Easter need that we have. At our house, the Easter Bunny leads the kids on a giant, far-ranging, whole-morning clue hunt that they have to follow in order to finally find their Easter baskets full of treats. To do that, the Easter Bunny likes to use our family stash of container eggs, but the thing is that I do NOT purchase plastic Easter eggs. Instead, I hoard whatever plastic Easter eggs the kids have happened to receive from other sources over the years. But somehow, some of those plastic Easter eggs walk away every year.

This is such a problem, you guys! A few days ago, we got out our Easter decorations and the younger kid helped me sort them. You want to know how many plastic Easter eggs we found?

Five. You guys, five plastic Easter eggs will not keep my kids busy running around on a clue hunt while my partner and I spend the entire morning in bed.

Obviously, we need more container eggs, and we need to DIY them, and they can't take a ton of time to make (I'd make these papier mache Easter eggs again in a heartbeat, because they were so cute, worked awesomely, and lasted for about five years before I finally composted them, but... they ain't quick to craft!).

It took just a few minutes to think up the idea for these little embroidered felt Easter eggs, and not much longer than that to make them!

The vast majority of the time spent on crafting these eggs is in the embroidering, which you don't even have to do if you don't want to. But this is just about the easiest embroidery project you can think of, so if you've got time to listen to an audiobook and hang out with your kids, I highly recommend doing your Easter eggs up all fancy.

Even better, there's an envelope closure on the back that's also quick and easy to hand-sew with your embroidery floss, and it's secure enough to hold a miniature candy bar, a Hot Wheels car... or a piece of paper with a Very Important Clue written on it!

Here's what you'll need to craft these Easter eggs:

• felt. Normally, I use Eco-fi felt, which is made from recycled plastic bottles. For special little handicrafts like this, though, I dip into my very small stash of wool felt that I buy here. 
• Easter egg template. You can draw your own, of course, but I use the four-to-a-page Easter egg template from Skip to My Lou. 
• embroidery floss, needle, and scissors.

1. Cut out one full egg template, and decorate! You seriously do NOT have to have any sewing or embroidery skills to do this. Just knot one end of the embroidery floss, start it from the back, and get to stitching!

If you think your work looks ugly, the trick is to keep embellishing it! Nothing--I promise you, NOTHING!--can look ugly when it's covered in enough pretty embroidery floss.

I did discover that the kids and I had an easier time thinking of cute embellishments when we lightly chalked some curved lines for our stitching to follow. Chalk will rinse right off of felt with a little running water, so it's a good choice for drawing any kind of pattern or template directly onto the felt egg front.

2. Make two more partial egg templates. In the photo below, you can see that I've got one full egg front, and two different egg backs that overlap each other by a couple of inches in the middle:

That overlap is important, because it's your envelope closure. To make it, first pin the bottom egg piece lined up with the bottom of your egg front, then pin the top egg piece lined up with the top of the egg front. Blanket stitch all the way around the egg to make it look like this:

If you wanted to hang this egg, you'd just have to stitch embroidery floss through the top and tie it into a loop.

If you wanted to stuff the egg, you'd just have to cut out one complete egg back (perhaps you could embellish that, too!), blanket stitch the two together, and stuff it before you'd quite finished stitching it completely closed.

The kids and I have a few more of these in progress, and plans to embroider some more together later today while we listen to Dracula (we finished Pride and Prejudice a couple of days ago, and now we get to watch the Colin Firth miniseries together!!!).

I hope the Easter Bunny finds them useful, and that none of them wander away...

Six Months Ago: The Scented Candle Workshop
One Year Ago: Homeschool Science: The Gummy Bear Osmosis Experiment
Two Years Ago: Nashville is Country Music
Three Years Ago: The Three-Day School Week
Four Years Ago: Earth Hour 2016 and 1980s Trivial Pursuit
Five Years Ago: Civil Rights for Kids
Six Years Ago: Geocaching on the B-Line Trail
Seven Years Ago: Finally, the Sun!
Eight Years Ago: On the Knitting Spool
Nine Years Ago: The Roller Derby Highlights Reel
Ten Years Ago: Dandelion Stir-Fry
Eleven Years Ago: ATC Swapped
Twelve Years Ago: Felt Food for Fun

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

All the Easter Crafts!

Easter is a good holiday for baking and crafting. Nobody but the Easter Bunny has to worry about presents, so there's no shopping or making, nobody is coming over, so there's no cleaning or decorating, and it's not one of our feast days, so there's no huge amount of cooking--give me white yeast rolls, a ham, and some chocolate bunny to gnaw, and I'm good for Easter!

So Easter, for us, is a super fun time of baking ridiculous treats and decorating endless eggs. I don't know what about that we all find so entertaining, but year after year, there it is--endless eggs! There's always something new to do with just one more dang egg!

Here, then, is the master list of my Easter tutorials. I loved compiling this list, because it took me back for years of Easters past, years of little faces focused in concentration as they do one more weird thing to one more endless egg, years of little feet stomping around and little hands picking Easter eggs out of their hiding places. Feel free to reminisce with me:

felted wool Easter eggs. We did these way back when I was into felting with the kids. It's been years since I've felted wool, but it's just now occurred to me that I bet Syd would LOVE needle felting...

chalkboard Easter eggs. This is our most recent Easter project, and Syd has been playing with it daily.

blown-out Easter eggs. The process is kind of gross, but I love that you can then keep the finished and decorated egg forever. They're delicate, but they won't rot.

woodburned and stained Easter eggs. As much as I cherish the memory of the cute little projects that my little babies got up to, I really enjoy making these more sophisticated crafts with them. Woodburned Easter eggs look really cool!

stained wooden Easter eggs. This is my go-to liquid watercolor staining method. It's brilliant, and looks awesome.



papier mache Easter eggs. If you're not into plastic Easter eggs, you have GOT to make these. You can hinge them so that they still open for treats!

tissue paper decoupaged Easter eggs. These can be kind of fiddly, but we use pre-cut squares of tissue paper, and that makes it a lot easier.

tie-dyed Easter eggs. This is a weird little activity for when you're tired of just dunking your eggs to dye them.

homemade natural Easter egg dye experiment. This was so fun, and a great excuse to drag everything out of the spice cabinet!

cascarones. We made these last year as Spawn Eggs for Syd's Minecraft-themed birthday party, but they're traditionally an Easter craft.

egg dye volcanoes. After you finish dyeing eggs, pour more vinegar into the dye bath, spread a layer of baking soda onto a cookie sheet, and let the kids go! I still remember how joyfully Syd played with this.

how to dye brown eggs. Because we've got LOTS of brown eggs!

Easter egg dye paint. Here's another fun thing thing that you can do with your leftover Easter egg dye.

miniature watermelon eggs. We actually made these for a dinosaur-themed birthday party, but they'd make super cute Easter eggs for an egg hunt.

Pysanky eggs. This is probably the most involved Easter project that we've done, but it was also the best-looking, and so fun!

embroidered felt Easter egg. These are a good replacement for plastic eggs, since they contain a secret pocket for treats!

glittered and embossed Easter egg. I LOVE how sparkly these eggs become!

I didn't realize how many projects I had until I was almost finished--apparently we really do try a couple of brand-new Easter crafts every year!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Crayons and Eggs

tips for dyeing brown eggs

We used our Pysanky dyes.

tips for painting with melted crayon

and tips for painting with Easter egg dye

Next week, I'll be writing about rain chains (and perhaps creating my own?), working on a rain barrel, trying not to kill the seeds that I've started, and attempting to spew out a scholarly essay on Margery Kempe as fanart. 

Bonus points if I can work in a reference to my own Harry/Draco fanfiction.

My Latest: Cardboard, and also Spring

a round-up of DIY bird feeders

another of organization projects that you can do using upcycled cardboard

a walk-through of the Pysanky eggs that we made

an essay on the environmental nightmare that is the Keurig K-Cup (with a great monster video!)

and a tutorial for making upcycled Girl Scout cookie box notebooks

I'm going to surprise all the kids with these at our next meeting, so I'm pretty excited.

Coming up for next week, I've been working on decoupaging a lunch box and putting cardboard dividers into another box to use as candle storage--you can expect tutes for both of those projects on CAGW. I figured out an awesome way to embellish plain pencils with tissue paper, so when I finish that, I'll write the tute up here on this blog. 

My biggest project, however, has been the hours that I've spent this week sawing up the GIANT shrubs planted just thisclose to our house--gee, I wonder why our foundation is crap? Today, I'm going to finish with the chainsaw (yay!), then dig a trench two feet from the house for a border, then spread landscape cloth and river rocks across that two feet so that we can, you know, actually access the side of our house for maintenance and repair.

Later this spring, however, part of the remaining space between that border and the driveway will be the new home to the dwarf fruit cocktail tree that I'm almost positive that it was foolish of us to order (if it sounds too good to be true...) and to Will's long-planned, long-awaited butterfly garden. 

Because grass? That's just the stuff that holds your place until you figure out what you ACTUALLY want to grow in that spot!

My Latest: Cookie Boxes and Egg Blowing

a round-up of crafts to make from Girl Scout cookie boxes

and a tutorial for blowing out eggs so that you can decorate them and keep them forever!

The whole family is going to try pysanky for the first time today, either before or after Will's Ice Show performance. 

In other news, this is the last day that I'll have the Paypal Donate button for Operation Cookie Drop up. Next week, I get to turn in my troop's cookie money and finish up with Girl Scout cookie season! Anyway, four bucks buys a box of yummy Girl Scout cookies for our soldiers, and the button is at the top left of my blog... for now.

Easy Dyed Wooden Easter Eggs

The little kid and I fell out of the mood for Easter crafting early this season. We didn't even make the toilet paper tube Resurrection scene that I had SUPER wanted to make, if only for my partner's absolute "WTF?!?" look when I showed him the project.

Ah, well... I never did score an empty tissue box for Jesus' tomb, anyway.

But last week on Good Friday (we should at least have done the toilet paper tube Jesus on the cross! Shoot!), while the big kid spent the whole entire solid afternoon at the library, the little kid did finally put down her horse and Barbie fashion design work for long enough that we could make one last Easter craft that we'd been wanting to do, and fortunately it was a super quick and easy one.

You will need wooden eggs, liquid watercolors, and small Ziplock bags.

Just as we do to dye other unfinished wooden objects, the little kid popped a wooden egg into a Ziplock bag, added in a couple of squirts of color, and squidged the color all around the egg, all safe and tidy inside the bag: 

As she always does with color mixing, the kid had a ball with this project. She experimented with design and color, ending up, of course, with lots of brown-that-we're-choosing-to-call-golden eggs:

For extra shine, you could rub some homemade beeswax wood polish into them, but we usually like them just fine just the way they are (well, those "golden" ones might get redecorated next year...). 

The egg hunt was EPIC this year--52 eggs hidden for these two kids!

So there was an epic egg hunt, the Easter bunny brought us candy and books, and my partner baked lamb for dinner.

Festive enough, I'd say, even without TP Jesus...

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!