Decorating an Easter Tree
Easter egg trees are becoming increasingly fashionable - who doesn't love an excuse to decorate a tree outside of Christmas?! - but they actually have been around for centuries. The Ostereierbaum is the German tradition of decorating a tree or shrub with hanging Easter eggs, and can be indoors or outside. You can turn a favourite tree in your garden into an Easter tree, or create one for inside your home with foraged branches and dyed, painted eggs and other ornaments. It's a lovely - and easy - family activity to celebrate the holiday and the start of Spring.
1. You can use a variety of branches - ones which work best have a Spring feel to them and are budding, or flowering. Make sure they are strong enough to hold your decorations. Our favourites to use are Cherry Blossoms, Magnolia branches and Pussy or Twisted Willow. If you are fortunate enough to have some pretty branches in your garden use those, but we got our beautiful twisted willow stems for well under ten pounds from our local florist in Brighton.
2. Once you have selected your branches, arrange them in a heavy bottomed vase or Mason jar (this will ensure that your beautiful creation doesn't get too top heavy and topple over) and fill with water. If using straighter branches such as pussy willow you may wish to add pretty marbles, or pebbles, in the vase to make sure the branches stay put. Our willow was so twisty it stayed in place without the need for this.
3. Finally, decorate your tree! We used our favourite fairtrade felt ornaments from Amica and Felt So Good, but you can really use anything! Go traditional with hand blown and dyed eggs hung on pretty ribbon, or get creative with the kids and make pretty paper decorations or pompom chicks. Start to build your own collection of heirloom Easter decorations, we store ours in a pretty tin and it's a joy to get them out every year and re-use them - reminiscing while creating new happy memories!
Most of all, have fun! Here's our finished creation, which you can see this year in our Brighton store, and features a mix of hand-felted mini eggs, festive chicks and bunnies (with carrots!) and some Spring friends too, including my favourite the Easter Toad, and pretty Lola the Ladybird and Colin Caterpillar. Check out the full selection of our beautiful hand-felted Easter decorations in our Easter section here.
