Lucy Corkhill

By Lucy Corkhill

01st April 2014

Easter always makes me think of crepe paper daffodils decorating the Easter bonnet I entered in to our school’s annual bonnet competition. How proud I was of those little yellow flowers! With nature bursting into life all around us at this time of year, there’s plenty to inspire craft activities and lots of materials to be gathered. Spring is naturally a time of creation too, when the Earth’s fertility translates as a general quest to make and create at home. Here are some fun Easter crafts to get stuck in to during the holidays, sure to keep you and your kids happily ensconced with paper, scissors and glue for hours…

Lucy Corkhill

By Lucy Corkhill

01st April 2014

Lucy Corkhill

By Lucy Corkhill

01st April 2014

Egg box chicks – put two cups from an egg box together (cups facing each other) and you instantly have a little creature! Paint it yellow and use orange pipe-cleaners to make sticky-out legs and feet. The two cups can be secured at the back with a staple or strong tape, leaving the front to open and close like a beak. Beaks can be further enhanced with some orange paper triangles taped to the inside of the cups and poking out in a point just like a beak. Wings can be fashioned from yellow paper and taped to the sides of your egg-cup chick. You can either paint little eyes on your chick or pick up some goggly eyes from a craft shop – these are a fun addition to any craft box anyway as they instantly add personality and character to just about anything.

Easter bunny ears – an amazingly simple and easy to make craft that delivers on the fun stakes. If you’ve got an Easter event to go to, you can rustle these up in no time. Even very little children can assist in making them and older kids may want to add their own quirky style or decoration. Simply cut a long strip of paper about an inch or two wide and use it to measure the circumference of your child’s head. Fix the band in place using strong tape (if using staples, be careful of them pressing into your child’s head). Cut out two large bunny ears from stiff card and affix to the front of the headband. You might like to decorate these with furry fabric, or pink innards, or perhaps your Easter bunny likes sequins and glitter…

Pretty window decorations – As with most festivals and celebrations, Easter is a great opportunity to fill our homes with lovingly made decorations. As this time of year is about colour, light and life springing anew, stained glass window decorations are a perfect way of capturing that spirit. You can make them as simple or elaborate as you choose, so this is a craft that can be adapted to younger and older children. Cut out egg shapes from stiff card and then trace a design for cutting out on them. Stick with simple shapes like triangles or hearts to start with; you can either use very sharp scissors for this, or a craft knife and chopping board. Behind each of the cut out shapes, position some coloured tissue paper and carefully cut to size, leaving just enough of a margin so you can glue the tissue paper in place on the back of the egg. As you get more confident you can make striped eggs and more intricate designs. When your egg is complete and the glue is dry, pull a piece of thread through the top of the egg with a needle, loop together and tie. This will enable you to hang the eggs in the window.

Easter bunny mask – This is a lovely, simple craft to do with younger ones and makes either a fun wall decoration or a mask. All you need are paper plates, cardboard for the ears, elastic if making a mask, and paints, but you can add further decoration as you wish. First paint the plate the colour you would like the bunny to be, and leave it somewhere warm to dry. When the paint is fully dried, lightly draw the bunny’s eyes, nose, mouth and whiskers onto the plate in pencil and then use paints to add definition. If you’re making a mask, hold the plate up to your child’s face and sketch in eye holes that correspond to their own eyes before carefully cutting them out. A mask will need a piece of elastic tied across the back to hold it in place, and a V-shaped snip around the nose helps the mask fit comfortably on your child’s face. Bunny ears can be cut out of stiff card, painted to match the face, and affixed at the back and top of the plate. If you’re making a wall decoration rather than a mask, goggle eyes can be purchased in craft shops, and pipe cleaners make fun whiskers. Little rabbit teeth can be cut out of contrasting white card and stuck on. Another option is to make an Easter chick mask complete with little beak.

A little Easter basket – Easter baskets can be rustled up easily from any recycled container and make a pretty addition to the table-top or an excellent vessel for collecting all those Easter eggs in! A perfect container is the rectangular cardboard ones tomatoes sometimes come in – a plastic one will do too but bear in mind poster paints won’t adhere to the surface. Cut a strip along the portrait edge of a piece of A4 card, preferably coloured, and bend into a handle shape. Affix to both sides of the basket using staples. Now for decoration! My tester wanted grass along the side of his basket, so we cut out two strips of green card for each side of the basket and cut the tops of both with jagged grassy edges. Once these were stuck on firmly with glue, we added several balls of cotton wool to make lambs and drew legs and faces on them. We painted the inside of the basket blue with white clouds and filled it with straw and moss so those Easter eggs have a soft landing… We decorated the handle with drawings of eggs and hearts. You might like to use yellow crepe paper to make tiny daffodils along the edge of your basket, or draw an Easter scene. Get the craft things out and see where the mood takes you!

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