We're not particularly religious folk. Hell, we're not religious at all. We tend to celebrate holidays in a strictly secular fashion, mainly as excuses to splurge in the retail clearance aftermath and indulge in seasonally themed candy. I maintain that the best candy is Easter candy. Sure, there's Halloween and Christmas, abundant with sugary goodness spilling out of bags by the five-poundful. But when else can you get a Cadbury Creme Egg? Or the perfectly proportioned peanut butter eggs? Or, my favorite, the Cadbury Mini Egg?
Oh, and I've been seeing amazing things being done with real eggs this year. I've been mesmerized by images of blown out eggshells, painted and dye and glittered and decoupaged and orthogonalized and intricately Fabergized. And I've seen the usual ones, hollowed out and filled solid with chocolate. Indulgent, sure, but I've been seeing those the past we years. This year, I've been lusting after the little cakes baked right into some emptied out shells. Genius.
But, of course, there is The Boy. His damned allergies prevent his enjoyment of eggs filled with milky chocolate, peanut-y butter, and, well, eggy egg. Me, I'm not too fond of those plastic dealios, so we do Easter our own way. Usually, I stitch up a couple of fabric eggs, fashion up a basket with whatever fabric I have sitting around (or fuse some plastic bags together for a base material, like I did last year), and toss in a one or two fun pick-ups from the toy store to round out the goodies.
Last year, we introduced the egg decorating component, gluing a quickly-scattered assortment of sparkly and pastely things to wooden craft eggs. That proved a fantastically messy and largely unsuccessful endeavor. I'm still finding bits and pieces from that exercise kicked under carpets and sprinkled between pillows and cushions.
This year, I went a little nuts with ambition. There were, of course, two baskets to assemble. I did that quite handily using that bucket pattern. It was the filling of the baskets where I may have gone a little overboard. There were all manner of little softies made, some using a circus-y print, some cut from linen I'd impressed with the stamp set I'd gotten for Christmas, some in a basic egg shape, big enough to slobber and clutch with schlubby little fingers.
Oh, but there were more eggs to be made. One largish, to hold the stamped linen pieces. One teeny-tinyish, to tuck away a little boy fistful of jelly beans. One flatish, to pocket away some stitched notebooks I still had on hand and some cutesy crayons I picked up in the dollar bin.
The Boy's basket was conceived as a sort of fleecy canvas, like those felt playboards you find sometimes in doctors' waiting rooms.Those linen pieces I'd stamped were backed with some scraps of cotton batting, and they grab on quite nicely to the basket's surface. Fun.
For The Girlie's basket I made my first ever linoleum block carving. Back at Christmas, Mr. New Media gave me a book of various printing techniques and a set of carving tools. Me and printing just seem to be a good fit, he said. Of course he's right. Holy cow, is it ever satisfying to carve something I designed into a block and then hand press it into permanence. Am I the only one who sees the addictiveness in the act of scraping negative space off a block? I foresee lots of this in my future. This first carving was pressed onto linen for a soft gnawable version of the real stuff in the yard that The Girlie's always trying to pluck into her mouth.
And then there's the matter of the egg decorating, which absolutely could not be omitted from the program, because (1) it's just good crafty fun with an almost-4-year-old, and because (2) he actually remembers last year's production quite fondly and has been asking on a near-daily basis for a repeat performance. But that's a work in progress for another post.
