Hello friends, thanks for popping in for day 5 of our Egg-ceptional Egg-xtravaganza. Today, Fiona and I are both sharing some Easter craft ideas for kids. You can take a peek at Fiona's idea HERE - she has created the most adorable little pom pom chickens.
For my post today I'm sharing a woven cardboard/fabric Easter basket filled with coloured salt dough eggs.
I found the printable template for the basket HERE. We traced the template onto cardboard and cut it out. Then, I cut a selection of long fabric strips, which Bella tied together before weaving around the basket. We used double sided tape to secure the fabric to the bottom of the basket. The weaving is a great activity to help promote fine motor skills too.
Once the basket had been weaved, we added a felt circle in the bottom, sprinkled with glitter.
Then, onto the salt dough eggs. I recently purchased a copy of The Easter Craft Book through Honeybee toys. It's full of lovely, natural ideas for Easter crafting.
One section in the book talks about creating salt dough figures for Easter. There are some sweet (and clever) designs in this section which inspired me to think about what other Easter designs I could do to include in the basket. We talked about making tiny bunnies or chickens, but in the end settled on teeny eggs. They are easy for small children to roll out, shape and they fill the tray with beautiful colour quite quickly.
The Easter Craft Book gives a different recipe for salt dough, but I decided to use my old favourite one:
- 1 cup flour
- 3/4 cup salt
- 1/2 cup water
- 1/4 cup cooking oil
- Food coloring
You combine the flour, salt, water and cooking oil together in a bowl, mixing it until combined with a spoon. Then seperate the mixture into smaller bowls, add a few drops of food colouring and mix through with your hands until the colour is even. Sometimes it's necessary to add an extra dash of flour - you want the mixture to be firm and not too wet/sticky.
Create and sculpt some teeny eggs.
Apart from this being a creative project, Bella also enjoyed:
- counting the eggs (a million times)
- seperating them into colour and counting each colour individually
- writing up the statistics on paper
- creating a list of who the eggs and baskets (we're making a few) will be for
- working out how many eggs each person will receive
Now the eggs are all sculpted, you can leave them out to dry naturally or speed up the process with an oven. We baked ours for 2/3 hours in the oven on a low setting.
Once the eggs are dry and hard, pop them in the woven basket (and a couple of pretty feathers if you like).
I hope you enjoyed the kids Easter craft post today. Fiona and I will be back with another Easter post on Wednesday (with a super exciting Easter pattern created by Fiona!).
