Quilted Easter Egg Garland

I've mentioned before that I am working on Easter Decorations for the house and trying to reuse and re purpose items in the process. This week I hit the fabric stash in my quest for Easter stuff. I have seen some cute garlands in the past on various sites and my daughter and I even made a birthday garland out of scrapbook paper that we have used for many a celebration. The problem with the paper ones is that they don't really hold up through the years. So for my Easter one, even though I initially got out paper to make it I switched to fabric in the end. So for this project I used scraps of fabric, ribbon, trim scraps, lace scraps, buttons and felt. Here is a quick step by step:

1.Draw a large egg on paper(about 6 0r 7 inches tall), cut it out.
2. Use your new egg pattern to trace out four eggs onto your felt, it can be any color.
3. Cut out the felt eggs.
4. Use your pattern to cut out 2 eggs shapes from each of your fabrics. This time add in a 1/2 inch seam allowance to each shape.
5. Cut a length of ribbon that will fit the space you want to display your garland, my window is about 36 inches wide and I used a piece of ribbon about 6 ft long.
6. Take your first two fabric pieces and sandwich a felt piece in between them they should be wrong sides together. Pin.
7. Slide your ribbon in between the layers leaving a tail hanging out long enough to tie around your window.
8. Sew all around the edges catching the ribbon as you go.
9. Do each of your eggs the same way, leaving an equal amount of space between each on the ribbon.
10. Finally you can leave them plain or embellish them as I did. I added scraps of trims and laces to two and then quilted over them. The other two have vintage buttons sewn on from my collection. You could also add ribbons, embroidery or anything else you can think of.

Enjoy!

Cheap Easter Crafts

So for the first time ever, I am hosting Easter for my family. I have always had a fondness for Easter, something about the pastel eggs, outdoor egg hunts amongst the fresh spring flowers and children dressed in their crisp Easter best. I have just begun to start to figure out my holiday decorating tastes these last few years. I went from a bunch of somewhat tacky, mismatched decorations for all of the holidays that were hand-me-downs from others to finally figuring out what I like. Simple understated character free decorations. These days I usually pick a room that my family will spend most of the holiday in, say the living room for Christmas and the dining room for Easter and just decorate that one room. This has worked so great for me since it means less work decorating every room and I don't feel overwhelmed by the decorations, I mean I work hard on my regular decorating so I really don't want to have to be removing it and replacing it for every holiday. So anyway that brings me to Easter, I really love all of the vintage inspired Easter decorations that I see and the beautiful spring colors, but I have only like two Easter decorations and I really want to have a pretty dining room for my Easter brunch, I need it to be Martha fabulous. The only problem is I'm trying to cut back on spending (aren't we all) and use and reuse things that I already have. So this past weekend I spent some time planning my brunch, coming up with some ideas for Easter craftiness and rummaging around in our goldmine of a basement. I finished three crafts including a door wreath and a door swag one for the front door and one for the back door. Both of these crafts cost me zero dollars. I found all of the supplies in my house and probably a lot of you have the same stuff floating around. I used this great tutorial to paint my plastic eggs, that's right I said plastic eggs, to look like chicken eggs or giant robin eggs if you like. It was a little time consuming and to be honest I seriously had my doubts about how it would turn out about midway through spray painting them. However in the end I was really pleased with the results. After my eggs were done I took an old grapevine wreath that was ugly and pulled all of the crap off of it and then glued some moss to it (yes I just happened to have some moss laying around in the basement) and then added the eggs, some I wired on and others I just hot glued. I love how it looks hanging on my front door. The next day I was once again rummaging in the basement looking for stuff I could remake and found some willow branches that my mother-in-law had given me, but you could easily just pick up some branches from outside. I cut them to a length appropriate for my door, arranged them into a shape I liked and then wrapped floral wire around them to secure. After that I wired and glued my eggs on and tied some ribbon, new door swag and it was free! The last thing I did was kind of a quickie project, I found a paper mache egg in our basement that was already painted in bright pink and orange, not exactly my taste so I gave it a makeover with some of the paint from the plastic egg project. Now it's very sweet and I love how it looks on my china cabinet. The only thing I did different from the tutorial on painting these was to use blue spray paint since we already had some in our basement. I also added some dabs of paint with a paint brush since I didn't think the toothbrush splatter was enough. If you don't have all of the items on hand for these projects you could easily get most or all of them at Wal-Mart or the dollar store for probably under 15 dollars. I have a few more free or cheap projects planned for Easter so check back soon for more good ideas and I'll also be posting my brunch menu along with recipes this week so you can start planning.