I like spring, bunnies, brunch and wicker baskets – so, I have no choice but to love Easter. I just made the Easter centerpiece for our dining room table at home and am showing how to make a similar one on Hallmark’s Home & Family this week. Except for an item or two (like the bunny), I already had or made everything. Here’s how you can pull something similar together.
I started with creating my structure and foundation. To create a focal point, hot glue a dinner plate to the top of a pillar candlestick and then place a glass cloche (or bell jar) on top. If you don’t have a cloche, try inverting a rounded bottom glass vase.
For risers, take a graduated stack of books and cover them with a neutral fabric. You can use burlap or muslin. I had this khaki colored cotton in the basement from another project. I then printed out some book names on plain paper, cut them out with pinking shears and hot glued them to the spines of the books. These can now be used under some of the baskets and bowls to give height and dimension to the centerpiece.
For planters I did a quick distressed finish on standard issue terra cotta pots. First, an undercoat of blue (or whatever your accent color is). Second, a top coat of white after the blue is dry. Third, a quick, light sanding with sandpaper in random spots so the blue, and even a little terra cotta, shows through.
For a fun way to hold the place cards at each setting, I took egg shells (try to use ones where the bottom 2/3’s is in tact), filled with a little potting soil and sprinkled on some grass seed. Leave them in a warm place for a week and you’ll get a great little mini-grass garden.
So, with the addition of 2 wicker baskets and 2 metal bowls, that takes care of my foundation pieces.
To add to these pieces I made plaster filled eggs. You could also use artificial, boiled, or hollow blown eggs. I just liked the idea of having real eggs that would last from year to year. I started with piercing a small hole in one end and a slightly larger one in the other of the egg and blowing out the white and yolk. My daughter Coco loved this part. I put a piece of tape over the smaller hole and set the eggs in a carton for stability. Then I mixed up a pretty liquid (that of pancake batter) batch of craft plaster. I started by using a paper funnel to pour the plaster into the eggs, but found later that using the inverted top of a squirt glue bottle was much better. Fill the eggs to the top, wipe off any spilage, and let the plaster dry. I then went back later with a tiny bit of more solid plaster to smooth over the hole and make it rounded like the rest of the egg. I made about a dozen and then filled one of the tin bowls and my Easter bunny’s basket.
Finally, to make the moss spheres, I simple took a styrofoam balls from the craft store and attached sheet moss using hot glue. I made three small ones, and one medium and large one, that was enough to fill out the table.
Then all that was left was to pull everything together! Use the covered cloche in the center and then layer things down on each side using the books to make things higher if necessary. I put cut flowers under the cloche and filled one of the wicker baskets with daffodils. The other basket I filled with the three small moss spheres and place the other two on the table. I put my ceramic bunny in the center with a potted fern on one side and the bowl of eggs on the other. The smaller ceramic pot I used for some more flowers. As a final touch I used the eggshells sprouting grass as place card holders on each place setting.
