An Easter Egg tree, that is!

After doing my wine cork Christmas trees, I still had a few styrofoam cones left over and was wondering if there was anything I could do with them besides save them for next year.

Then I looked on Pinterest. There were a lot of Easter Egg trees in there, but they were either all made with pieces of ribbon or those big plastic colored eggs that open up to put candy in. That didn’t really do it for me. Too big and bulky.

So now that I had an idea…how to carry it out? And when I have an idea, I don’t rest until I figure a way to do it.

So I decided to check out my first go-to stop for non-jewelry making projects. Dollar Tree, of course. And luckily they had bags of small pastel colored foam Easter eggs. How perfect! I didn’t have a clue as to how many I’d need, but I figured I’d make several different sized trees, so I’d start with 12 bags. Each had a dozen eggs in them, so I figured I was good.

Then I realized I needed something for the top. I couldn’t use my leftover Christmas tree stars for Easter, but I found some Easter bunny heads on dowel sticks, probably designed for sticking in flower pots, but they were perfect for my trees!

Pleased as I could be with my purchases, I went home and planned my tree. The next day I set up on my kitchen counter and got to work. I don’t use hot glue in my craft studio because it’s too messy and my craft table has a tablecloth on it, and well, you can imagine what a mess that could turn out to be!

Gluing on the eggs was fairly simple; just time consuming. I hadn’t counted, though, on the glue dripping slightly through the eggs on the bottom row and sticking to the counter (it didn’t do that with the wine corks!). Fortunately dried hot glue isn’t that hard to get off if you do it quickly.

What I  hadn’t thought about, though, was how many of those little eggs it took to complete a tree. I’d started making a medium sized one which was almost finished when I realized I probably hadn’t bought enough eggs to quite finish two trees. Oops!

Then I remembered I’d bought over half of the bags of eggs they had at the dollar store, and I knew if I waited, I wouldn’t be able to get enough to make all the trees I wanted to do.

So I headed back to the store and got…eight bags. All they had left. Now what?

Fortunately there was another dollar store a mile or so away so I headed there, hoping they still had them. And as luck would have it, they did!

I bought 32 bags. Almost all they had in the store! I think the cashier thought I’d lost my mind. And I probably had.

But now I had enough to make another set of three trees as well as two more small ones for our granddaughters!

Egg tree assembly is really fairly easy as you can see from the pictures below. You just glue the eggs on in a row starting from the bottom. There will be gaps because of their shape, so I used bits of green moss to fill in the areas where the foam showed through. It’s a bit messy, but when the hot glue dries, trim the moss up as needed. And now you’re ready to put your bunny toppers on. I cut the dowel sticks off the bunny heads from the dollar store and substituted floral wire to make it easier to stick in the foam. And please pardon the quality of the pictures, because I just don’t get the best pictures when I’m creating at the same time!

And one last hint. These take a lot of hot glue, so be sure you have enough glue sticks on hand! I lost count of how many times I had to refill my glue gun! But at least it’s now ready for my next project!