Easter Egg Tree
I recently saw a picture of an egg tree on social media. It was small and had little robins eggs on it. I thought it was cute, but I was excited to put my own spin on it. This is a project that grew (ha) and evolved as it went along, and in the end I think I ended up with a very Easter-y egg tree.
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Supplies:
Floral stems
Floral tape
Paint brushes
Cardstock
Glue gun/glue sticks
Plant pot
Cardboard
Optional:
Toothpicks
Piece of dense foam (for drying)
Watercolor paints/brushes
Floral foam
Most people probably think of pastel colors when they think of Easter, but if you’ve been hanging around here long enough, you may know that that’s not really me. Easter makes me think of a lot of color. Spring flowers and the world waking up. I had already made my colorful bunny garland, and the colors on these eggs are even bolder than that. I love it!
I’ve been using my color shift spray paint whenever I can, but I’ve learned not to use spray paint on foam. (See how I melted some of my pinecone bird bodies.) A couple of weeks ago I came across this set on Amazon of color shift acrylic paints that you brush on, and I had to try them.
I bought my floral stems at Michaels, but I couldn’t find floral tape to match. I ordered a 4-pack of tape from Amazon to try to match, but even the lightest shade of green wasn’t a great match. I used it anyway. I realized later that I had a roll of green tape that is pretty darn close, so oops. I may go back and fix it later, but I’ve decided it really doesn’t bother me that much right now.
The first step was to paint the eggs. To prepare my workspace, I started by poking toothpicks into the bottom of the eggs. This served two purposes. First, it gave me something to hold onto while I was painting. Second, it helped with the drying process. I found a piece of dense foam (it’s actually my needle felting pad) that I could stick the toothpicks into, and voila!
As I do any time I use my color shift spray paint, I painted a coat of black first. The paint packaging actually shows how the paint might look over both black and white. I might try leaving the eggs white next time, but I really like how they turned out with a black base. It did take several coats to get good coverage, so it was a time-consuming project, but the finished eggs look very striking.
While the eggs were drying, I prepared my floral stems. The ones I bought are really long, so they work well for building a tree. I left a few of them long, so that I could wrap them together to build a base, and then I cut the rest roughly in half. I attached them with floral tape. Once I had the trunk taped together, I bent the rest of the branches to form something that looks like a tree.
Once the eggs were dry (I left them overnight, but it didn’t necessarily take that long for them to dry), I pulled each toothpick out and stuck a floral stem in its place.
To make the leaves, I took a piece of green cardstock and cut rough leaf shapes out of it. I took each leaf and covered both sides with a thin coat of green pearlescent watercolor paint. It adds just a little sheen that works well with the eggs.
I attached the leaves with hot glue. I ended up with one leaf per branch, but you could make as many leaves as you want. Anything goes!
This is where I dropped the ball as far as taking pictures go. I think I was too busy just trying to figure out what I was doing that I forgot to document the process as much as I’d planned. I will tell you what I did though!
My original thought was to more or less put the tree in a jar and call it a day. It’s a tree, though, so I decided it needed a pot. I found this IKEA pot that I’ve had for years and cleaned it up a bit. It took me a while to figure out how I wanted to keep the tree upright in the pot, and I finally settled on cardboard. I didn’t want the tree to sit all the way on the bottom of the pot, so I cut a piece of cardboard that fit a couple of inches above the bottom of the pot. Then I cut two more circles, one that fit about an inch down from the top of the pot, and one that fit a little above the bottom circle. I used scissors to cut a hole just big enough for the trunk to fit through in the very center of the circles. It holds the tree pretty well. I didn’t attach the cardboard to the pot so that I could take it apart for storage, but then I ended up getting glue on it late. (More about that in a bit.)
I had the thought after the fact (of course) that I could have used floral foam. You can get it in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but I’m thinking a cone cut down to size would work really well. You could even glue it to the bottom of the pot, and it wouldn’t go anywhere.
The final touch was to add some filler to the top of the pot. I considered marbles, glass chips, and all sorts of other things before finally settling on plastic Easter grass. It IS an Easter egg tree, after all. Easter grass has come a long way since I was a kid. We gave up on using it a long time ago in baskets because it is such a mess. I had so many options this time though! Crinked paper grass, big plastic strands, solid colors, multi-colored, iridescent—amazing. I bought three different colors, but I ultimately settled on the clear iridescent. It’s beautiful!
Even the newer grass is as unwieldy as I remember the old stuff being, so getting it to stay in the pot was a challenge. It didn’t help that I only had an inch or so of depth to work with. I ended up using probably a third of the bag, and once I’d glued it down some with my glue gun, I ended up trimming some of the more unruly strands back with scissors.
That’s how I made my egg tree! Let me know if you make your own!
