Springy Eastery Garland

Some of you may remember seeing this photo on Facebook a couple of weeks ago.

I was having a particularly creative Saturday (it was the day I made my peg bag out of shorts) and decided to spruce up some sticks I’d bought from Ikea. I’d bought them because I could imagine them hanging over my fireplace, all covered in pretty springy decorations, but up to that point they were just sticks with a few flowery fairy lights!

So I grabbed some plastic eggs (really cheap from the supermarket), a jar of paper flowers and a jar of buttons and this is what happened…

I loved the colours of the eggs, but not how plasticky they looked. The paper flowers disguise plastickiness nicely! And I love the bright, spring colours too. I hadn’t really planned them to all look so coordinated – it was only once I’d finished that I realised I’d chosen really similar colours for each flower.

In addition to the eggs, I also cut up some fake flowers to add to the flowery fairy lights (the big white flowers in the photos below). I’m not usually a fan of fake flowers, but I’d bought these to go in my basket when I was Red Riding Hood (it was a dress up day at school – I don’t usually dress up as fairy tale characters!) and it seemed a shame to let them just gather dust somewhere. I really like the different pinky colours too.

As I was unpacking boxes I came across a couple of other decorations. I think this tin egg was a gift from a child at one of my placement schools when I was training to be a teacher.

And I made this heart several years ago when I was experimenting with sewing fabric and paper. I really like it, but think it must have been a bit of a pain to make since this is the only one I have!

I finished off the garland with a few tin heart bells that I found in a lovely local shop. I love their colours and the soft jingles they made as I hung them up.

Here’s the finished product, complemented nicely by the bunting which used to hang on my bookcase.

So things are complete – for the time being! I love the fresh feel of all the combined items together, but at some point (probably soon after Easter) I’ll take the eggs off and replace them with other things. Not sure yet what I’ll replace them with though – any suggestions?