Easter, and really any opportunity to get together with family and friends, is a great time to get creative with decorations – from an eye catching centrepiece to smaller decorations in and around the house and garden.
Easter is a great time to entertain. I love having my family over at this time of year; the weather is cooler as we’re in autumn, but it’s still bright and sunny and beautiful in the sunshine. Perfect weather to be outside.
Last year for Easter I decided to decorate using a “natural organic with a splash of colour” theme. The overall look was really effective and inexpensive, so I wanted to share with you some ideas that you might like to incorporate into your Easter decorating.
For my centrepieces, I wanted some long narrow crates to run down the centre of my tables. I didn’t want them to be too wide or high, but did need them to be reasonably long as I have long tables. Typically, I just couldn’t find anything in the shops that fitted what I was after. I was very thankful that my partner offered to make me some, especially as I needed 8 wooden crates for my table centrepieces (remember that I cater for 20 to 30 people on most occasions).
Making them ourselves worked out a reasonably cheap alternative as we didn’t need a huge amount of wood. The crates aren’t very wide, and are only 2 slats high. If you’re able to source recycled or scrap wood or pallets, it can work out very thrifty and it’ll have a unique look all of its own.
To decorate, I placed four $2 daisy pots (potted colour from Bunnings) inside each wooden crate and filled in the surrounding space with hay.
I covered each table with burlap tablecloths, added a lace runner (an old lace curtain cut into wide strips) and placed my beautiful crates in the centre. The overall effect was natural, rustic and colourful, I just love it.
My very creative sister made some crafty egg-shaped shells for the table which looked amazing. To make them yourself, blow up and tie a balloon to your desired size. Cut a long length of multi-colour string (can be found in Spotlight, a bargain store, or you can use lengths of different colours if you can’t find a multi-coloured string). Dip the string into pva glue watered down with water (to make it running) and wrap around the balloon. Make sure you leave enough gaps between the string if you’d like to fill them with chocolate eggs. Set aside to dry. Once completely dried, pop the balloon and remove.
I placed the colourful crafty eggs around the centrepieces and added some raffia to soften the edges (I had this at home, but you can use some more hay instead). Then to finish I scattered the table and centrepieces with enough chocolates to keep even the most hard-core chocaholic happy!
In addition to my main tables, I also like to decorate the food table in the same theme, just slightly different. As there’s usually quite a bit of food to squeeze on, I usually keep the decorations small and simple. A large glass bowl filled with a heap of colourful chocolates looked effective, and took zero time to make. To change things up this year, I’m ditching the bowl of chocolates and will instead fill with coloured tulips. Add a bunny and carrots made of material and I’ll have a beautiful natural centrepiece that doesn’t cost the earth and can be mixed up every year.
Moving on from decorating, it’s just not Easter without an Easter egg hunt for the little (or big) kids. Living on a farm means that I have the room to really get the kids hunting, but I did keep the hunt to a smaller area when the kids were little. Now they’re older it’s an awesome opportunity to go all out and make it as challenging as possible. But melting chocolate and eggs left and not found are always a draw back. So this year instead of hunting for chocolate eggs, my sister (Julie) and I have come up with an idea for the kids to hunt for coloured tags in the shape of their name. The kids then swap each colour name tag for an egg which I’ll keep un-melted and un-nibbled (maybe – no promises) at the house. Hunting for tags or something similar rather than eggs is a great option, meaning you can limit the amount of sugar the kids tend to eat on the day.
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So this year they’ll be no more melted bunnies or chocolates left for the wildlife to eat. The only down side to this is not being able to laugh at my sister as she hunts for those last remaining eggs all over the property. Seriously, in 10 years she’s never been able to find them all. She’s 36 years old as well which just makes it so much more fun. I’m still not sure why she never found that caramel egg I placed under that leaf. It’s only a 10 acre property, it wasn’t that hard……….
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