Last Minute Easter Ideas - Three Easter Themes

Looking for some inspiration for Easter centerpieces and decor? Here are some images of three different Easters we hosted in our home. The theme colors were: Yellow & Green, Blue & Brown, Pink and Rustic. Hope this helps!

A Yellow and Green Easter

Some of the easter decor from around the house.

Mini Daffodils from the store, covered in mounds of moss.

I mounded various kinds of found moss on silver platters.

I dyed eggs & while they were still wet, rolled them in coffee grounds for a more natural look.
Let the eggs dry, then brush off the grounds. Repeat as necessary for desired look.

Yellow and Green eggs nestled into the moss, made a fun centerpiece.
Add mini Daffodils for a complete Easter vignette!

A Blue & Brown Easter

The moss on silver platters are back! This time with robin's egg blue shells broken on the top and filled with water and little blue & white flowers. Other various blue eggs are nestled in, including chocolate eggs.

Pull out any matching china you have. Here is some on tray at our coffee station.

The buffet had a centerpiece of brown and blue eggs and candles wrapped in blue ribbon & twine.

I used white and brown eggs and blew-out the insides before dying.

The dessert table and fun blue polka-dot napkins.

Another glimpse of the centerpieces. Notice the blue egg on the table in the upper left corner?
Those were real egg shells that I dyed and filled with chocolate and ganache. 

(Find the recipe here. Thank you Martha Stewart!)
They made fun deserts for everyone to un-peel like a real egg!

A Pink and Rustic Easter

For this Easter, I Modge Podged old book pages onto plastic eggs & mixed in with white and pink dyed eggs.

Here they are on my kitchen shelf.

Kitchen shelves decorated for easter with old Fiestware and silver.

The centerpieces were pink, white & book page eggs hanging from branches. (I hot glued little loops of twine on each egg.)

Here is the centerpiece in the Dining Room. I used some antique pink & white linens I had under each centerpiece.

Dessert plates stacked in the corner wait for their debut.

Stacks of china for the adults and less precious plates for the little ones.

Save on dishwashing! Use paper cups to make beverages easy - you can use for hot or cold drinks and
write your name on them. Use plastic silverware rolled up in napkins & tied with twine to make the buffet line quick too.

Plenty of outdoor seating as weather permits - overlooking a fun game of croquet in the back yard.
Tables are dressed up with white linens and topped with pots of pink primroses.

Kids table topped with white butcher paper, playdoh & coloring crayons.

Hope this gives you some fun ideas to try out. Happy Easter! And don't forget the TRUE REASON we celebrate this Easter. Christ rose from the dead, conquering death so that we may have life.

He is risen indeed!

Pretty Peonies - Ombre Style

I love Peonies.  They are my favorite flower.  They are similar to roses but with twice as many petals.  So get ready for a second post about flowers.  Its summer now and I just can't help myself.

I have been stalking driving by my favorite place - our local flower farm - every few days, watching and waiting for the first Peony buds to open.  And now that my favorite place has my favorite flower, I can't help but share them with some of our favorite people - our teachers!

The kids and I gathered an armful of peonies (for just $7!) to divide up into gift bouquets. 

Following the teacher theme, I became the Art Teacher to my kids while we made these bouquets, teaching them the art word of the day: Ombre.  Ombre means having colors or tones that shade into each other - used especially in fabrics and design in which the color is graduated from light to dark.  Its actually an old French word meaning "shaded". 

So if you didn't know that, there's your art lesson.  Ombre is all the rage right now - in fabrics, flowers, party themes, fashion, even hair.  Google it, I'm telling ya.

Anyway, we created "ombre" bouquets, using all the shades of pink peonies we could find, then clustering them from lightest to darkest.  We kept this theme for the gift tags too, by using paint chips (free at the paint store) that also were in graduated pink shades.

Here's all it took to make this pretty little gift:

- Mason jars ($0 - we already had these, you could even use a soup can)

- Pink ribbon ($0 - I already had different bits of pink ribbon. But twine or string can work too.)

- Paint swatches ($0 - free at the paint store)

- Peonies ($7 per bunch at the flower farm = four bouquets, plus a little left for me.

Total cost: less than $2 per bouquet, plus a little time.

Here is the end result: (Sorry the quality is not great, I forgot to take this picture until we were in the car making our deliveries.)

We put the bouquets in a shallow bucket in the car and the kids took turns delivering them.  Since school was already out for my kids before the peonies bloomed, we didn't have a chance to give these to their teachers so we opted to give them to the teachers we knew personally.  We were able to deliver them to their doorsteps on their first full day of summer break.  Happy summer!

It was a fun summer activity, it made a pretty little teacher gift, and it was a great way to get our kids involved with giving back and having a thankful heart.

The Lupine Lady

Its lupine season.  Have you noticed? If you don't know what Lupine flowers look like, here they are:

Beautiful aren't they?  They are quite hearty and can grow wild (or in gardens) around here.  I don't think I noticed them much as a kid.  That is, until my mom read to me the children's book Miss Rumphius. 

If you've never read this award-winning book and you have kids, check it out at the library.  Beautifully written and illustrated by Barbara Cooney, the story follows Miss Rumphius who has 3 goals in life:

1. Travel the world.

2. Settle down by the sea.

And most importantly, 

#3 - Do something to make the world more beautiful.  This is how she  becomes known as "The Lupine Lady". 

The story is so lovely and so haunting (in a good way) that it has stuck with me to this day.  I love that thought. I want to do that. I want my kids to do that too. 

So with all these lupines around, I was reminded of the book and decided to check it out again. So that I could read it to my children just as my mother read it to me.  I also had a hankering to get an armload of lupines from our local U-Pick Flower Farm.  (Any excuse to visit this little piece of heaven!)

In a way, the woman who runs this flower farm is her own version of The Lupine Lady.  The world is a more beautiful place because of her. And for only $7 you can bring home a whole armful of this beauty.

And that's what I did.  And this is what was waiting on the table for my kids when they came home.

 

It was wonderful to read it to my kids and share the dream with them - to be our own versions of the Lupine Lady when we grow up and make the world more beautiful.

Easter Decor

With Easter only weeks away, I thought I'd post some fun ideas this week for entertaining on Easter.  Today I'll show you some decorating ideas.

Last year we hosted Easter dinner and an Easter Egg Hunt at our home.  What started out as small quiet idea blew up into 45 people!  I. was. in. heaven.  I love entertaining and always dreamed of having a big enough house to do things like this.  Wish granted.  

To prepare, I started weeks ahead of time, gathering ideas and supplies. I did a daffodil inspired theme using green & yellow, lots of nice china & silver, and my old friend - moss.  The centerpieces are always where I like to start - they are the focal point of the whole meal.  So I gathered mini daffodils, silver platters, piles of gathered moss, and some specially died eggs (that I'll show you how to make later).  Here are the final results:

Easter Centerpiece - close up (notice the coffee table in the background has a similar arrangement).

 

 

I wanted the centerpieces to look like little grassy, mossy knolls with daffodils growing, and eggs nestled around them.  I used all sorts of things (paper bowls & cups, wadded up paper) to build up the mound around the pots of daffodils.  Then the morning before Easter, I went to my previously scouted spots and gathered all sorts of cool and different kinds of moss.  I carefully cut and shaped the mosses around their new landscapes - and voila!  Here's some good shots of the different mosses:

 With the extra moss, flowers and eggs, I decorated the rest of the house.  Here's a few shots of random decor here and there:

The Easter Egg cards were from some extra inventory I still had from my stationery line ages ago, back when Stardust Designs was Stardust Stationery.  Stay tuned for a tutorial on the dyed eggs, the flower baskets and more pics from that beautiful Easter Day.

Touches O' Green

I promised to show some of the touches of green that are around the house in honor of Spring and St. Patrick's Day too.  As I've admitted before, I am a true Northwest girl and I love me some moss.  This is a great option in early Spring before the flowers are out in full force.

This week, I've been showing small pieces of our front porch.  So here it is put altogether.  The Spring Wreath and the Mossy Urns only cost me about $10 total.  The rest I already had, including the old Christmas bows that I stuck in the big urn (they're a place holder until I can plant some flowers).  Its pretty simple and green - but that suits me fine for early Spring.  Plus, it didn't cost much so I can use the money I saved for flowers next month. 

Here's a better "during" picture (the colors are truer in this pic)...

Now, going inside I have a few touches o' green in the living room and dining room... 

I bought [fake] moss balls at the Dollar Store.  They come in a bag of maybe 7-10 and are usually near the vases.  Its hit-or-miss when they're in stock, so you have to keep an eye out for them!

On the dining table I have an old set of china displayed (pictured above) that my mom got for me ages ago.  Then last year while antiquing, I found some matching pieces on their dollar shelves.  What a deal!  I love bringing it out every Spring.

Here are a few more pics from around the house...

And in the kitchen...  I try to always keep the sink area pretty, since I'm staring at it so much!  The urn hides all the ugly unsightly sink stuff (sponge, scrub brush, SOS pad, drain plug, etc).  Its easy to reach and helps the sink look tidier when people are over.

So, there you have it.  A wee bit o' green before St Patty's Day. Anybody making green mashed potatoes or maybe something authentically Irish?  This year, I'm making homemade Pea Soup w/ ham.  Happy St Patrick's Day!