Easter at Home, during a Pandemic

It was surprisingly pleasant! Who knew that dyeing eggs bright colors and eating a lot of ham could temporarily put a lid on that bottomless well of aching horror?

Even though we still have full days of school (it's a small comfort to know that my children's schooling is the one thing that hasn't been completely disrupted by the pandemic, considering how  most other children are struggling right now with the annihilation of their school routine on top of all their other stressors), much of that time that the kids used to spend being shuttled to and from extracurriculars, as well as the extracurriculars, themselves, is now free.

Instead of spending that free time sitting on the couch and staring with dead eyes at the wall, for the past week, at least, we've been spending it making ALL THE EASTER CRAFTS.

We spray painted wooden eggs out on the driveway, then decorated them with paint pens and acrylic paint. They turned out amazing, and we loved them.

I taught Matt to blow out eggs, then went a little crazy and ended up blowing out about a dozen on my own (head rush!!!), and then went even crazier and tried filling some of the eggshells with cement and some with plaster.

The cement did not work for me AT ALL... almost as if the random cement that I just happened to have in my garage isn't the exact right kind of cement for making Easter egg molds. Imagine that!

The plaster of Paris worked perfectly, I guess. I mean, it technically worked. Tape off the small hole:

Enlarge the larger hole and then fill it with plaster of Paris:

After about an hour or so, spend WAY longer than you ever wanted to spend in your entire life peeling eggshell off of plaster--

--and then marvel at this. Completely. Typical. Egg:



I guess that if you 1) wanted a reusable Easter egg, 2) did not have any wood or papier mache eggs to use, and 3) DID have plaster of Paris, this would be a good way to DIY some non-egg Easter eggs to paint, but eh. My plaster egg looked identical to every other egg in the world but was a billion times more annoying to make. I am definitely a wooden egg person all the way!

The kids and I made embroidered felt Easter eggs while listening to podcasts and then the first hour of our new Dracula audiobook (only fourteen more hours to go!). These were awesome, too, and were super useful during the kids' Easter morning clue hunt, on account of these eggs can be hidden in very obnoxious places that three-dimensional eggs can't:

Also awesome? I dragged out my under-utilized set of silk dyes for the kids to use to dye our chicken eggs:

These resulted in epic Easter eggs, you guys. EPIC!!!

Check out those saturated colors, those deep jewel tones! And I don't even understand how some of the eggs came out of the dye bath with that metallic sheen?!?

I was actually sad yesterday when we peeled them all and made them into deviled eggs. They really were almost too pretty to eat!

Alas, Syd found the process of hand-molding crushed shredded wheat mixed with melted butter and marshmallow to be so disgusting that it quite spoiled the fun of eating the resultant shredded wheat bird nests:

It didn't spoil the fun for me, though! They were delicious!

Matt had his own DIY build: a drill-powered LEGO egg decorating machine!

Will, especially, LOVED this drill-powered egg machine. She used Sharpies and Prismacolor markers with it, and the eggs came out really pretty! 

The Easter Bunny traditionally leads the children on an Easter morning clue hunt to find their baskets--I swear that our Easter Bunny was doing this years before the Easter Bunnies of all the Instagram influencers! Matt and I generally linger in bed and listen to doors and cabinets slamming, stuff getting kerfuffled during frantic searching, kids loudly bickering as they run around the yard at too early o'clock on a Sunday morning, etc., and only come out when there's a silence that means that each clue hunter's mouth is too full of candy to gripe at her sister.

I don't know what everybody else's Easter Bunny does, but our family Easter Bunny pretty reliably gives the kids too much candy plus a couple of presents that I'm confident they're supposed to share, but instead they always want to divvy ownership of. Later, I will have to talk Will into sharing this wood carving kit with Syd--

--and Syd this sticker mosaic kit with Will:

Our weather forecast was dire, so I was worried we wouldn't be able to have our insanely competitive Easter egg hunt outdoors this year, but fortunately, the rain held off long enough for me to madden the children by hiding 100+ Easter eggs really, really, REALLY WELL!

I don't know why the kids get so competitive over this, as it's literally just our stash of reusable Easter eggs with zero prizes to gain, but at one point Syd found an egg right where Will had just stepped, and in retaliation Will lost her ever-loving mind and just started crawling through the grass to hunt. And then Syd tried to swoop down on the entire basket of eggs that Will had abandoned when she started crawling, and Will got to her feet, ran at her, and chased her off with a stick!

We more successfully divvied up responsibility for Easter dinner, even though we didn't get to eat it until after 9:00 because for some reason Will's math class still met on Easter. Yawn!

Matt made the ham, the mashed potatoes, and the Cadbury Egg martinis for the adults, Will made roasted carrots, Syd made roasted asparagus, I made deviled eggs, and Syd and I made an absolutely epic garden cake.

I had wanted to make something exactly like this Betty Crocker garden cake, and was more than a little worried when my best efforts were making it look exactly like trash, instead, but hallelujah, Syd stepped in with a grass tip and good design skills--

--and our final cake was the cutest thing that I ever did see:

Alas, we didn't have enough room in our bellies to even taste it after our 9 pm Easter dinner! Ah, well... garden cake is also delicious for breakfast.

Easter isn't such a big deal to us (over dinner last night, Will was all, "So, today is Jesus'... birthday?"), and honestly, I think this is by far the biggest fuss we have ever made over it, even counting when the kids were small and wanted to dye eggs every day for a month!

It was vastly more of a sugar fest than my body needed right now, but it turns out that it was exactly what my heart needed.

I'll remember this Easter fondly even when the lawnmower is still hitting random eggs in August...

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!

How I Sew Re-Usable Fabric Face Masks

I HATE sewing these re-usable fabric face masks, and I hate seeing my family wear them. 

I mean, they're not hard or unpleasant or tedious to sew or anything, and the designs look fine and fit well and everyone says they're comfortable, but I hate everything about this pitiful, uncertain shot in the dark in the face of a global pandemic.

I haven't even read the "do they/don't they" articles about whether or not these fabric face masks do a dang thing to protect one from a highly contagious virus. I figure that if there's even a .01% chance that wearing it offers .01% more protection, then obviously we're going to wear them when we have to be out.

Or, in Syd's case, when she's chilling on the couch reading the instructions for her new DIY screenprinting kit:

 

I'm not going to tell you how to sew these face masks, because I don't want to be responsible for you. Instead, I'm gong to tell you how, when I wasn't busy reading every book ever written, *I* sewed these face masks, roughly following the tutorial printed in my local newspaper, since this is also the type of re-usable fabric face mask that local medical establishments, nursing homes, and non-profits that serve the community are asking for. 

For each mask, I used two pieces of 100% cotton quilting fabric, cut to 6"x 9", and two pieces of elastic around 1/8" to 1/4" wide, cut to 6.5" long. I later learned that although Syd is taller than me, she has a petite face, and her elastic probably should have been 5" long at the max. She shortened her own elastic to make her mask fit her well.

I've used both 1/8" elastic and 1/4" elastic, and found that the stretch matters more than the width. For a couple of family masks, I used 1/4" elastic that I pulled out of a super old fitted sheet as I was ripping it up for kitchen rags, and the super old, super soft, super stretchy elastic worked great. For a friend, though, I made another four masks using new 1/4" elastic, and it turned out to be too stiff and uncomfortable to be practical.

I put the two pieces of 6" x 9" fabric right sides together, then pinned the elastic to the corners. I started by folding back the top piece of fabric, and placing the elastic where I wanted it against the front of the bottom fabric:

I wanted it to be at an angle like that so that I didn't catch more than the end of it when I was sewing the fabric pieces together.

I pinned one end of the elastic just to the bottom fabric--



--straightened it out, because twisted elastic would be NO fun behind the ears--

--and then pinned the other end to the corner below it:

I repeated this with the other elastic on the other end of the mask, and then I pinned the top fabric down, sandwiching the elastic between the two fabrics.

I sewed around the perimeter of the mask, leaving an approximately 3" opening for turning and backstitching over the elastic at the corners:

I clipped the corners to reduce bulk--

--and then turned the mask right side out. I finger-pressed the raw edges of the opening to the inside to match the seam, then ironed the mask flat.

I edge-stitched along the top and bottom of the mask only, once again backstitching when I stitched over the elastic. Those little buggers are not coming off!

Because I used a 1/4" seam to sew the mask together, I was left with a flat mask that was approximately 5.5" tall. From the bottom, I pinched the mask at 1.5", then brought that fold down to the .5" mark, ironed it to crease it, and pinned it:



Next, I pinched the fabric at the 2.5" mark, folded it down until this second fold butted up to the first fold, then ironed and pinned it:

I never did figure out how to get my tucks perfectly even, so for the third tuck, I just pinched the fabric 1" from the top, brought it down until that fold butted up to the second fold, then ironed and pinned it:

Eh, they're not totally noticeably uneven, and you can't see the tucks when we're wearing them, anyway.

The only remaining task was to sew down both sides, stitching those tucks in place:

With my fifth mask, I started backstitching every time I sewed over a fold, and I think they look a lot sturdier.

Here are our family masks in all their glory:

And here's me about to low-key risk my life and the lives of my family for a trip to the grocery store!

At least we bought enough food that, barring emergencies, we shouldn't have to shop again for a month.

And by that, I mean that we bought a bunch of delicious food that we'll eat all of in a week, and then we'll go back to the rice and beans and cheese that we already had in the house for the three weeks after that.

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!

Plaster of Paris eggs. You make these right in an eggshell, so they look perfect. Tbh, they look so perfect that you might be all, "Why did I put all this effort into making... a literal egg?" Because it takes paint beautifully, that's why!

Felt PEEPS bunnies. Felt fabric and blanket-stitched embroidery floss make this a super accessible project for any level of sewist.

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!