Saturday, April 11, 2009

Last-minute Easter crafts

Well, I've be meaning to make this pillow project for a month now but time apparently slipped away from me. Now that it's Easter weekend, I figured I'd better post it!

The little Easter basket is a snap to make. Here's what you need:

+ empty strawberry basket
+ felted sweaters
+ pipe cleaner

What to do:

1) Pick two Easter colored sweaters and felt them (for felting tips, see my earlier blog post). Then cut three strips of felt that are 1" wide and about 22" long.

2) Weave the strips in and out of the spokes of the basket. You may need to adjust your weaving pattern (e.g., over one, under two) for everything to come out evenly. Tuck in the loose ends.

3) Cut two more strips that are about 8" long -- one should be 1.75" wide and one should be 0.5" wide. Lay the narrow strip on top of the wide strip, and then lay a pipe cleaner on top of both. Use a sewing machine and run a zig-zag stitch over the pipe cleaner, joining the whole sandwich together.

4) Use the free ends of the pipe cleaner to attach the handle to the basket.

5) Add Easter grass and candy and you're done. Dark chocolate is of course preferable.

The pillow isn't as easy to make, since it requires sewing vinyl together. However, it can be worth the effort give then end result. Here's a close-up of the pillow showing the little chicks that I sewed inside.

Detail of Easter chicks pillow

Why would I want to sew fluffy little Easter chicks inside in a vinyl pillow? I guess it started when I saw the stuffed animal couch on "Small Space Big Style." I thought that was one of the coolest ideas I'd ever seen for functional repurposing (and still do). Then last month I saw bags of Easter grass in the stores and decided that Easter grass could work well as pillow stuffing.

After a mash-up of those two concepts, I ended up with this wacky Easter chick pillow. And of course, I couldn't resist trimming the whole thing off with chenille pom-poms. Hope you get as big a kick out of it as I did. Here's another shot.

Easter basket and pillow

1 comment:

Nancy at EmbroideryIt.com said...

Your basket turned out very sweet!
Nancy
www.basketmasterweavings.blogspot.com

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