Gearing up for Easter

Well, in 2 days school ends and it will then be just two short weeks until Good Friday. Are you excited? Or slightly aghast?

Well, I have a few easy ideas for you coming over the next couple of weeks. If you want to make a tomb garden as we have for the last couple of years then now is the time to order some air dry clay off Amazon or Baker Ross or they have it in Hobby Craft which, let’s face it, is one place you don’t want to go with a credit card! The air dry clay takes 4-5 days to dry so if you want to make the garden to display for the few days before Easter, now’s the time to think about it.  I made our new tomb (last year’s got dropped) in front of an episode of Top Gear Songs of Praise and we’ll be making the garden after school today,

Why so early, you may ask? Well, tomorrow, I’m giving a little presentation to my daughter’s reception class on how we celebrate Easter in our home. She wanted me to take in our Easter lamb bread, 24 red-dyed boiled eggs (one each for her class mates) and our tomb garden. Plus I’ll have to do the eggs and bread to do again two weeks later for our own Easter breakfast! Of course, I’ll get a little chance to talk about why we’re celebrating and I explain a bit about what I’ll be saying in my latest Families first blog post over here. Do have a read. It’s all about Jesus, the Promise Keeper.

I think you can see how we made our garden above. We light one more candle each day on the days leading up to Easter, finishing by rolling back the stone and lighting the candle inside the tomb on Easter morning. This year we’re just using bedding plants and I think it’ll be really pretty but last year we used cress too to fill in the gaps.

I’m also planning on making our own set of Resurrection eggs. They’re about £12.50 from Amazon but I’ve seen a set and the booklet included, while well done, is too complicated for my 2 and 4 year old. So, after this lovely post from The Vicar’s Wife, I’ve decided to make my own. The plastic eggs were £1 for 12 at Hobby Craft, although they are a bit big to go in a normal egg box. Any ideas on how to display them, people? I’m planning on making them with Pigwig and then hiding one each day during the school holidays. Each egg contains a little symbol of part of the Easter story (a ball of cotton wool soaked in perfume for the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet, a coin to represent the blood money given to Judas etc.) and a little bible passage so that the story unfolds gradually as each egg is opened. I’ll get some pics up but go check out the Vicar’s wife blog anyway. She’s a great writer!

I’ll blog on the lamb bread and the red eggs next week as they need less preparation time but start collecting onion skins (the yellow ones) if you want to make the eggs! Or, you know, buy red dye, which is easier and what sane women who don’t want to look like Lady Macbeth at pick-uptime do!

If you want any more Easter/Holy Week ideas, there are loads over here. We made this lovely sun-catcher last year (or 2!) which made a great postable present for Granny. There are lots of similarly easy makes for us non-crafters.

Many are super easy, especially if you have a printer available to you and do feel free to ping me over any pins you find if you’re on Pinterest yourself. (You don’t have to register to see the board).

Finally, I’ve just redesigned the blog a bit, as much for technical reasons as design ones. Any comments on either the look or the usability?