April 22, 2011

Easter crafting

My Easter egg collage (the bottom row is felted, I'll save that post for another day)
Yesterday I could not resist decorating my house for Easter, before starting my traditional baking marathon. Easter is one of my favorite holidays and the most important in Russian Orthodoxy. There are traditional sweets to bake such as kulich and pascha.

Eggs to color (this year I tried some new naturals dyes, still a mystery in the fridge...). Above are some of the blown out chicken eggs that I have painted with acrylics and nail polish over the years.
The fabric egg display.
For a few years now I have been doing fabric eggs, this year I didn't have chance to make them, but my girls and I sure had fun decorating with our ever growing collection. In my zeal to decorate and share I posted a photo to Facebook and got so many lovely comments on it that I thought I would share my process here.
I start with styrofoam eggs and sand away the ridge. My other ingredient is glue, preferably Modge Podge or a matte medium.
I pick some fabric scraps and randomly cut them into smallish shapes. Fabric selection is important as if it's too thin the glue will seep through and if it's too thick it will not "hug" the egg.
I start by brushing a layer of glue onto my egg and randomly attaching my fabric pieces.
Make sure that the pieces butt up against each other with no spaces showing.
Some overlap is OK as long as the fabric is not too thick.
As I start running out of space, I start cutting my fabric pieces to fit. Hopefully only the last few will need to be trimmed.


Now you can just let the glue dry and leave as is. Or if have some small sequins you can attach them by pushing a pin through the center right into the styrofoam. I have also used brass pins to make designs over the fabric.
Have fun digging into your stash!

5 comments:

Kristin L said...

I didn't put out any of my decorations this year. :-(

Your collection is so varied and wonderful!

Susan Schrott said...

Natalya this are just wonderful...I really appreciate your love of tradition and all the creativity you put into these egg "gems"

sukipoet said...

the eggs are just beautiful. i esp love the felted ones. thanks for showing us how to decorate a foam egg. Have a wonderful Easter.

joni beach said...

Natalya, this is a great technique for using scraps of beautiful fabrics...I love this idea! Thanks for sharing it. joni

rossichka said...

They are all so beautiful!!! I also had a post about Easter eggs...