Ever since my oldest daughter was a baby, I have been decorating Easter baskets and filling them with colorful eggs. In addition, to dyeing hard boiled eggs and stuffing plastic eggs, I made "cascarones." Cascarones are traditional in Mexico, and are basically whole eggshells that are dyed, stuffed with confetti, and patched with tissue paper. During family and friend gatherings after Easter services, children go around cracking them on each others' heads. It sounds painful, but it's really a lot of fun!
When my youngest daughter was 4 years old, I started decorating an egg per year for each of my two girls to have as a keepsake. At first, I used cascarones, which I papier mached for strength and durability. However, I later started using wooden eggs sometimes. I use acrylic paints, markers, collage and other media to decorate them. I've made religious eggs, cutesy eggs, glamorous eggs, you name it. Being a borderline OCD artist, I coordinate them with whatever the theme of the basket is. It just makes the baskets look better - LOL!
This year, I went with a Religious folk art look, and painted Sacred Hearts on the eggs. I used wooden eggs and gessoed them in burnt umber. I sponged them with pink and yellow acrylic paint, to create some depth and interest. Then, I used various colors of sharpie to sketch the Sacred Hearts, the girls' names, year, and some doodling. I added some dimension to the design with various colors of Tim Holtz distress stickles, as well as some glossy accents. I also used acrylic paints to fill in some larger areas of the design. To seal my artwork, I gave them two coats with a mixture of Liquitex gloss medium and yellow Pearl Ex powder pigment.
To continue the theme, I used basic manila tags and cut small rectangles from a piece of paper with an Easter egg print. I used a Martha Stewart cosmos punch to cut flowers from a recycled Church bulletin. Then, I used a Martha Stewart hydrangea punch to cut flowers from a plaid print paper. I layered 3 of the flowers and used the fourth one alone. I arranged my flowers on the tag and used a musk green calligraphy pen to write my girls' names. All the pieces were edged with various Easter egg colors from a Color Box petal point ink pad.
Since my oldest daughter is now in college, I decided to make Easter Bags this year so she could take hers with her. I repurposed two shopping bags that I had kept after I made some purchases at a local gift shop, because I liked the vintage newspaper print. I arranged the eggs and other treats in the bags, folded the top of the bags down, and stapled them. I created toppers for my bags from a 12"x12" pink print piece of paper. I cut the paper in half, folded each piece in half horizontally, and trimmed the corners with a decorative EK Success punch. The edges were also inked. I secured the toppers on the bags with some tape, and then I stapled my tags from the cord onto the bags. I reused some pink polka dotted bows my girls used to wear when they were little to glue over the staple.
I had a lot of fun putting these environmentally conscious Easter bags together for my teenage girls, and they really enjoyed them. Since the
Stampendous team is having a "Recycle, Repurpose, Reuse" challenge in honor of Earth Day for the first Saturday in April, I'm linking this post to their pages. I'd love to hear what you think, so please feel free to join my blog and/or leave a comment. I would love to hear about your family's traditions too, so let me know if you posted any of them on your blog. Blessings!
