20 DIY IDEAS FOR EASTER

This quick and easy bunny ears napkin folding will look great on your party table. Fold your towel in half diagonally. Fold the triangle over itself a few times, a few centimetres wide, to form a band... just as you would if you were wearing a scarf around your neck. Take a beautiful Easter egg, surround it with your strip of napkin and hold it in place with a small piece of string tied at the top of the egg. Place the egg and its napkin on a plate. Shape the two ends of the napkin to create the rabbit's ears. You can add a small flower pricked into the string if you like. Make the same peritoneal for all the guests' napkins.

Uliana Kopanytsia

Traditionally, it's the bells that bring the Easter eggs. To keep the tradition alive, create your own Easter bell to ring to warn young and old that the egg hunt is on! Take a ball of self-hardening white clay. Shape the ball well then, using your thumb, hollow out the centre. Pinch the edges between your fingers to smooth them out a little at a time. Give the shape of the bell. Leave to air dry by piercing the top of the bell with a toothpick before the clay is completely dry. Pass a string through the hole at the top of the bell. Slide a wooden or clay bead into the bottom end of the rope. Secure it with a knot in the string, so that it can hit the edges of the bell when it is shaken. Secure the top of the string by making a loop over the bell so that you can hold it in your hand and ring it.

Thanks to vegetable dyes, hard-boiled eggshells can be given magnificent colours. All you have to do is cook hard-boiled eggs in water dyed with different plants depending on the colour you want to achieve.

For a pretty aubergine to pink colour, use aronia juice. For orange eggs, add madder root to the cooking water. Surprisingly, cooking eggs with red cabbage will turn them blue! The bilberry juice will produce purple eggs. Turmeric will give you golden-yellow eggs. For pink eggs, you can use beetroot juice.

You can also obtain other colours by multiplying the dye baths. For example, for green eggs, soak the eggs first in a decoction of red cabbage and then in a decoction of turmeric.

Each plant dye bath will give a different result depending on the quality and quantity of plants, vegetables and spices used... The possibilities are endless!

This traditional Ukrainian technique involves drawing reserve patterns in liquid wax on the eggshell. The heated wax is applied using a special stylus with a very fine tip, allowing you to draw meticulous patterns. The egg is then dipped in a first bath of coloured dye. Other motifs are added to the wax, and the egg is dipped in a second dye bath of a different colour... and so on. The wax is then removed by passing the egg under a flame, revealing patterns coloured according to the different dye baths.

These eggs are offered at Easter as talismans. Patterns and colours have different symbolism: joy, life, wealth, fertility, spring... So many wishes that each artist shapes on the shell.

Place your design under the layer sheet. Using a grease pencil, mark the nail locations on the outline of the design. Transfer these locations to the wooden board.

Organise a painting workshop with the children. Let everyone let their imagination run wild and create brightly coloured patterns with a paintbrush or even with their fingers directly on a hard-boiled egg.

Cook hard-boiled eggs and decorate them simply using white Posca markers. Geometric or floral decorations - let your imagination run wild!