Easter

Easter at Puriri Lane is spent with family and friends and it always brings me great enjoyment to create a welcoming space with beautiful food, drink, loads of Easter themed decorations along with consuming a few chocolate Easter treats!

The Easter table is always filled with bunnies, chickens and all things Easter and this year will be no exception. Have a look below for a few ideas on how to theme your home this Easter and a few photos of Easter's gone by at Puriri Lane.

Easter in the garden at Puriri Lane

We have some beautiful hand felted decorations that have given me the inspiration to create an Easter tree and this will be the centrepiece of the table. 

This beautiful Easter wreath will be adorning our front door this Easter - you can purchase these here.

The table itself is decorated with our Country Hares Oilcloth which you can find here - pictured below

Country Hares - Oilcloth

CREATE YOUR OWN EASTER TREE

Gather the following:

A tree branch

Spray paint if you wish to colour the branch - white or even a pastel colour would look great - I left mine plain as loved the natural look

Moss to glue onto the branches 

Glue gun for attaching moss 

Terracotta Pot - I used one that was 16.5cm high with a 19cm opening at the top

Builders mortar to concrete the branch into place

Serviettes to decoupage the pot

Modge Podge - available at Spotlight

Small paint brush for glue

Plastic wrap

Can of coloured spray paint for the top rim of the pot - I used a colour that complemented the serviettes that I used

White spray paint - I painted the terracotta pot all white so that when the serviette was placed on the pot the background matched the serviette and the terracotta colour did not show through.

 

LETS BEGIN ...

Prepare your pot by spray painting the base of it the colour that you want to use remembering that you will be able to notice the background colour of your pot based on your choice of serviette colour background.  Spray paint the rim of your pot in your chosen colour. You can see in the below image I have painted the rim orange to tie in with the autumnal theme and the pot white as my serviette background is mostly white.   It is better to prepare your serviettes prior to starting as the glue does dry quite quickly.

Get your serviettes and peel them apart and you will left with the image - discard the base.  I placed my serviette onto the pot and then cut it so that it would wrap around the pot and not be too crinkled when I applied it.  I applied the glue directly to the pot although some people prefer to apply direct to the serviette, you choose which suits you best.  If you make a mess of it, you can always soak the pot in water and start again which I did have to do once!

Apply your serviette pieces onto the pot. Because the serviettes are quite thin, they will often wrinkle once you have applied them, but this is also part of the charm and adds character to the surface of the pot.  Just remember you need to move swiftly and once your serviette is in place it is it is hard to move it without tearing.

Have a look on Youtube as there are lots of videos that can show you how to do decoupage the pot if you are more of a visual person.

Once you have completed the pot, leave it to dry and then prepare your mortar to cement your branch into the pot and lean it up somewhere to support it overnight until the mortar is dry and then comes the fun part... decorating.

My finished pot ready for decorating

The next day you can start to decorate it with your chosen decorations.  

My completed Easter tree which will sit in the middle of our Easter table 

  The decorations you can find here in our Easter Collection

 Easter Baking

Easter for us would not be complete without Hot Cross Buns and some home made baking.

Here is a recipe for my Easter Carrot Cake which I have been making for years - the icing just makes it and is a beautiful cream cheese frosting.  It is a beautiful moist cake and quickly devoured whenever I make it. I decorate it at Easter with a chocolate Lindt Bunny and a scattering of candy covered eggs. The one below I just used a Camellia from the garden as decoration.

My carrot cake is always quick to disappear at Easter

With little ones there is always so much fun to be had and below are a few pictures from years gone by when we used to have a lot of fun doing Easter Egg hunts, pin the tail on the bunny and dress our John Deere tractor trailer up as an Easter basket and take my niece and nephew up and down Puriri Lane - I am not sure who enjoyed it more them or me! 

Pin The Tail On The Bunny with my niece and nephew - Harley & Eden

The Big Puriri Lane Easter Egg Hunt

The joy of my Niece Eden finding a hidden Easter treat 

Everyone needs a set of bunny ears

         I made Easter Chick Cake Pops and bread with sprinkles in bunny shapes using a cookie cutter and pink lemonade which the children loved!

A great thing to do with children is dying eggs - just simply a drop of food colouring in 250mls of water and we just used hard boiled Quail Eggs - loads of fun to be had with this Easter project.

We made little Easter flags for their straws and filled the bottles with pink Lemonade - a little Easter treat

Lots of fun to be had decorating the room for Easter

Below are some little chocolate noodle nests that we made

 However you spend your Easter, be sure to enjoy and appreciate the the things that are special to you about it

Deb x