Easter revisited

I first started dinking with this whole blog thing around Easter-I thought it would be an opportune time to start the blog and share our Easter/Springtime ideas. But, alas, busy life got in the way-as well as writing other posts. So now I have a chunk of time to go back and revisit Easter.
We have a spiritual family but do not adhere to any religion. I consider myself a seeker. There are bits and pieces of various spiritual practices that resonate with me and I incorporate them into my own path. We don’t celebrate Easter in the Christian sense-there is no mention of Jesus resurrected, etc. We also don’t bow down to the Corporate Easter Bunny and “his” big pre-packaged plastic baskets et al. (For a diatribe on Easter and commercialism click HERE!!!)
For my family, Easter is a celebration of Springtime, the re-awakening of life, anticipation of light and warmth and new exciting possibilities. It is such a wonderful time of year to celebrate with children, themselves the embodiment of new, young, fresh life. It is also a hard time of year in Alaska to realistically celebrate the re-birth of life when the snow outside is usually still up to my knees! I mentioned some of the ways that we bring spring inside our home for a more realistic experience in a previous post. I put a lot of emphasis on symbology –the egg, the rabbit, the new tight buds on branches, the sheep and it’s wool-hoping that the more etheric aspects of my children absorb the deeper meaning of these archetypes as well as giving them delight in the physical side of creating and artfully altering these symbols of renewal.
Most of our crafts revolve around the egg: The embodiment of fertility, creation and immortality. The womb from which we quicken and emerge. The catalyst for new life. We try to visit some baby chicks- another incarnation of new life and the warm light of the returning sun.

Every night we read a special story about the Spring Bunny, the barer of abundance. ( I plan to write a bunny story of our own and will share whenever that happens.) We collect long branches to force indoors and get a sense of spring that is not yet realized outside. We also start working with raw wool bought from a local farm in order to incorporate it into our crafts.
This year we used the wool that we dyed last spring to make felt eggs. After sealing the eggs closed with duct tape

we wrapped strips of wool that had been dipped in hot soapy water around a plastic easter egg-gently squeezing the egg and rolling it between our palms to coax the fibers to interweave and tighten. The girls enjoyed picking out their favorite colors, and adding layers to make a thick firm beautiful egg.

We then put each egg in an old nylon and popped them in the washing machine and dryer to make the wool extra tight.

I decided to make a cute chick puppet by cutting a slit at the bottom of a yellow egg and popping the plastic egg out of it. I then stuffed some plain wool up into it to give it shape. I followed this whole procedure again to make an egg shell for the chick. After cutting the slit in the bottom of the shell, I cut a zigzag around 3/4 of the shell to resemble a cracked egg. Inset finger and there is your puppet. The cats really like this chick. Since it was made they’ve practically pulled it apart. They are SO BAD.

We tried a new idea this year with dyeing our eggs. We wet some hard boiled eggs with water and stuck tiny pieces of colored tissue paper on them. When the eggs dried we peeled off the tissue paper. The color remained on the eggs. We also did our usual dyeing with natural dyes. We used turmeric, canned blue berries, and boiled spinach. I'm not really sure how they got that mottled effect but it was pretty cool!

Here's our buds and hanging eggs. We didn't make the eggs but it gives me ideas!

The kid's baskets from the Spring Bunny usually contain minimal candy-with the exception of the stupid "Parsnip Pete"(again, see above mentioned post!), a hand made gift, stuffed animal and craft or game. Iwanted to make our own natural looking baskets but they just LOVE the pretty baskets our friends gave us. Oh, Well!

Despite the delayed spring and continuing snow we've had a nice celebration of it. Next, we'll be going back to our bag of raw wool to study it's "lifecycle"-from sheep to sweater.