Easter Centerpiece Craft

Since we are living in a rental house for awhile before we decide where we want to buy, we have limited how much we have unpacked.  Don't get me wrong, we aren't living out of boxes or anything like that.  We have just decided that there are some things that we'll leave boxed up for a while.

One of the things that we have stored away in boxes is all of our holiday decorations.  I imagine that we will eventually unpack the Christmas decorations if we are still in this house at Christmas time.  But the few decorations that I have for other holidays will remain boxed up.  They are like searching for a needle in a haystack.  It's not worth opening 10 boxes labeled "decorations" hoping to find those little rabbit salt and pepper shakers that I usually put out at Easter time.  (Although maybe we'll find the cord to the external hard drive that contains all of our pictures from the last three years!  But I digress!)

The other night I was looking through Pinterest for some recipe ideas and noticed that my feed was full of Easter decoration ideas.  I did try to skim over them, but let's be honest, if you've ever been on Pinterest it's pretty hard to not get sucked in.  What would it hurt to make a small Easter centerpiece for our dining room table?  My only real restriction is that we are very limited on crafting supplies on this island.  We do have a Walmart that sells craft supplies, so I decided that I needed to find something that I could possibly make using only supplies I either already had or could purchase at Walmart.

I came across this idea and figured it should be pretty easy to find all the parts. 

So off to Walmart I went.  After evaluating all of my options from their two aisles of decorations, I came up with a plan.

Using plastic eggs was an option.  Of course there were tons of plastic eggs to choose from.  Big eggs, small eggs, pastel eggs, shiny eggs, camo colored eggs, superhero eggs, if you could imagine it they probably had it.  The problem was that each kind came in a pack of 50+ eggs, and I didn't need near that many.  Then I discovered these paper mache eggs that were pretty much a blank canvas.  I used Scott's drill to drill a small hole in the bottom of each one.  Being that they are made of paper, this was pretty easy to do.

Using some paint that I already had on hand (always good to use up the supplies on hand!), I selected some pastel colors to paint them.

Each egg required two coats of paint to completely cover.  I used some BBQ skewers that we had in the kitchen to hold them while they dried.  

The pearl colors were beautiful and I loved the way they turned out.  But who can leave well enough alone?  I decided to spruce them up a little by using some glitter paints that I had.  I slightly regretted this after I did it.

Then I left them overnight to dry before putting them together in the basket.  I didn't especially like the visual of the BBQ skewers in the finished project so I picked up these fun straws to use instead.

And of course I needed a basket of some sort to put them all together.  There were basket several options.  I debated about buying an actual Easter basket, but most of them were plastic and, to be honest, more expensive then I was willing to spend for something I didn't particularly like.  I really liked this box/basket, and I think the checkered pattern ties in well with the straws.

I cut the straws to different lengths so that the eggs would be at different heights.  The straws were just a smidge wider than the holes I had drilled so I pinched them together prior to putting a dab of hot glue on the end and sticking the egg on top.  

The floral green foam that held the eggs while they were drying was cut down to fit inside the box/basket and the eggs were arranged into the foam to form a bouquet.  I tied a few pieces of ribbon around some of the straws, but I didn't really like this.  Unfortunately I had already hot glued the ribbon to the straws before I decided I didn't like it.  

To finish it off, I used some Easter basket grass to cover up the floral foam.  I carried the Easter grass over to the top of the table and added an "Easter" sign that was in my craft stash from last year.  

I'm pretty happy with the way this project turned out.  

Paper mache eggs = $1.98

Paper straws = $2.94 ($.98 per pack.  I only used four from each pack and could have just purchased one pack but I like the different color options.  I'll add the extras to my stash for another project.)

Box/basket = $1.44 (Everything is just sitting in this box so that it could be used for a different project in the future.)

Easter grass = $.38 (I used less than half of the package and could easily gather it up after the holiday to used in future project.)

Total Cost = $6.74