Eggs of all sorts; blown ones, hard boiled, eggs painted with water colors, dyed with beets, turmeric, onion skins and henna, some dyed in patterns created with rubber bands, some with flowers and leaves pressed to them, some colored with pencils and crayons.  In the last picture are felt egg pockets inspired by dear, sweet Taisa.  Last year I said that some year I would get around to making felt eggs for stuffing.  Who would have thought that it would be this year of all years?  Certainly not I.  At the time I had something fancier in mind, like these.  And I would still like to make some of those at some point, but when I saw the very simple ones on Small Wonders I thought, I could do a few of those this year.  Then maybe next year make some more of the same or a different sort and so on until we were all covered.  But really I wasn’t sure that I would get to them at all.  One day when I was sewing Galen was itching for something to do, so I cut one out for him to hand sew beside me.  He finished in record time.  Since my machine was all threaded and in front of me, I decided to play with some of those decorative stitches that I never use for the next one.  I decorated the front and he sewed it together.  When Iain and Elijah saw them and the possibilities for all of the fun things the machine stitching could do, they raided my felt stash and took over production (I did help with a couple more).  They fooled with all kinds of things and decorated the fronts, then passed them along to Galen to hand sew or sewed them closed on the machine or hand sewed them themselves.  We actually decided that we liked the ones that were sewn closed by hand the best, as there is more room in them.  It’s a shame I didn’t have more spring-like colored felts on hand.  But they kind of remind me of Pysanka , those vividly colored Ukrainian Easter eggs.  All together we made 24, which meant 6 eggs for each kid and a plastic free year, just like that!

The baskets this year ended up being like a whole day smorgasbord of snacks.

In lieu of books (for the first time ever), we gave them supplies to finish their rooms.  I’m strongly anti-bringing anything into the house that might end up on the floor at the moment.  So we gave them things like stencils and material for curtains, instead of books and yet more little stuffed bunnies and the like.

(the auto-focus on my camera is broken and no one else has quite gotten the knack of manual focusing)

I don’t know why I always insist on sewing Màiri Rose a spring dress for Easter.  I very well know that the weather is just as likely to be winter-like as spring.  Yet I can’t seem to wrap my brain around making a warm and cozy Easter dress.  Maybe a long-sleeved dress in a spring print?  I don’t know what the answer is.  I do know that this years was entirely hidden under a cardigan for most of the day, along with my spring dress, and that we were both still cold.