How about a little Easter themed week at YAMF? Sharon is back today with another genius craftorial. Her paper bag Easter eggs are hunt worthy but could double as favors, place cards or even invitations.
Can you believe Easter is right around the corner? I mean, we’ve been seeing pins for Easter stuff for months already but it is now time to actually get prepared for the upcoming holiday. I decided that this year I would make paper grocery bag Easter eggs. They are super easy and can be made various ways depending on your craft skills (mine are low to moderate in case you were wondering) and materials on hand.
It all starts with a paper grocery bag that you can get for free with your groceries. Or if you are all Eco and bring your own reusable bags I’m pretty sure you could simply ask for one. This would probably also work with card stock (although I didn’t try it) and for sure works with fabric. So pick your poison. I’m going to mainly be showing the paper bag version. First choose one of the corner seems and cut down all the way to the bottom panel. Then cut out the bottom panel following along the creases. This will leave you with one big flat piece of grocery bag to work with. Cut out rectangles a little bit larger then whatever size you want your finished egg to be. Try to make sure that you have a matching size for the back piece as you will need 2 rectangles per egg.
There are tons of way to personalize these eggs. Although I possess no actual drawing skills, I am lucky to have family members who do. I enlisted them to make some characters that my sons would like. I also used some stamps on a few and then let my kids color some of their own.
Find the rest of the tutorial after the jump.
The next part is where you have to assess your sewing talents and decide if you are going to go that route or choose to use a double sided adhesive. I realize some people might not be in to using their machine for sewing on paper but that is why I bought my machine. Sewn paper just looks super cute. But if you are feeling wishy washy about your skill set or just don’t have a sewing machine, these can still be made. Just know they won’t be as cute as the ones your neighbor made with their sewing machine. I made some really quick egg templates out of cardboard in 2 sizes. I would have liked to make a more mid-sized version but well, most of crafting is what I call Nap Time Crafting. While my kids don’t actually nap any more (Earth to 3 year old, most kids cut their moms some slack and snooze for a bit during the day at this age. Just think about it. That’s all I’m asking) this means that I only have about half an hour at any given time for the TV to watch my kids, er, what I meant to say was for my kids to watch TV…Lightly trace the egg shape around the design that you have drawn, stamped, scribbled on the paper bag.
Then take it to your trusty sewing machine. You will be sewing the egg sort of like a pillow where you leave an opening for the batting but in this case your opening needs to be large enough to fit candy, toys or whatever else you want to put in your egg. Start near the top and slowly follow along the pencil mark. You should probably do that back and forth thing with the machine to make the stitch stay in but I have no idea what that is called (I told you I’m a total sewing novice). Sew around the egg and stop at about the same part that you started at on the opposite side of the egg. If you have opted for an alternate method, you would basically use double stick tape of Glue Lines to attach the front and back of the egg pieces together.
This is egg-sactly what it will look like. Couldn’t help myself. Using either pinking shears or regular scissors, cut out around the sewn line leaving as much of a margin as you want.
At this point, you should probably erase the pencil lines you drew as a guide. People will be like, “man, you free handed those bad boys? Color me impressed.” The eggs are now ready to get stuffed and closed.
Here is where we close up the eggs so that we can hide them in yard and elicit shrieks of joy from the kids. This is also where we pretend I know what I am doing in terms of photo editing and pretend that the color in the two pictures above matches. I put the candy in the egg and grabbed my Glue Lines to close them up. Simple as that.
I did smaller eggs with a little candy to hide around the yard and a larger egg with toys that you could use in place of an Easter basket. My family does not believe in baskets that are as tall as the child, but a small selection of toys and candy. Especially because they will attend between 3 and 4 egg hunts that day and get sugar induced comas at each.
I mean…if that adorable little face doesn’t sell you on these eggs, I don’t know what will? These paper eggs would be great for your family, an Easter party favor or even for a classmate treat. And you can still recycle the paper when you are done which is totally awesome. I’d like to give a quick shout out to my mom-in-laws hands in the sewing machine portion of this post. Trying to figure out how to get my hands sewing with the camera on the tripod and in good light made my head hurt so I forced her participation.
