"Spring" into Easter crafts with
vintage images of Easter past!

Making Easter crafts is especially traditional because the holiday has a built-in craft: dyeing eggs. The first commercial egg dyes came out around 1880. Victorian families gathered to decorate eggs and baskets, and organize egg-hunts on the lawn for Easter morning.

Other Easter crafts of the period included stuffed fabric bunnies and chenille or yarn chicks. Children would weave baskets of rush and willow. Decorating the house with arrangements of fresh spring flowers and greenery was essential. Paper and silk flowers and garlands were made by hand to decorate everything from tables to hats.

But the egg ruled. Hollow confection eggs known as panoramic eggs were modeled of marzipan or sugar with miniature candy figures inside. Paper machè eggs would be decorated with decoupage, gilding, painting, printed scraps, and anything else on hand. Natural materials like flowers, feathers and bird nests were popular.

And then there is the Easter bonnet. Large, elaborate hats for women were all the rage in the 1800s. For spring, they were festooned with flowers, leaves, lace, ribbons and birds. Those that couldn't afford a milliner hand-crafted their hats, and the rule was always "more is better." The Easter parade began as a New York phenomenon in the 1870's, where the fashionable set would promenade in their bonnets and new spring finery on Easter Sunday.

Easter is a wonderful excuse to make something showy and springlike to shake away the dreary winter. The egg is a miracle of engineering, and also a great starting point for Easter crafts. Vintage images from Easter past can give you some ideas!

As always, if you need anything for your Easter crafts, Joann.com is online with fast delivery, and only a click away.

Easter Crafts

	"Paint" an Easter Painting that has the vintage charm of a treasured Old Master. You start with a plain white artist's canvas and layer on paint, an Easter vintage image, crackle varnish, and brown glaze. Just what the Easter Bunny would paint if he ran out of eggs. A picture-perfect Easter keepsake!
	Ready for a "cheep" thrill? Our exclusive Easter Egg Card design is pure Victorian. It has moving parts! We provide the vivid vintage images and complete instructions for this Easter card that opens for a surprise.
	A Flower Pin on your lapel will make you the belle of the Easter Parade! These frilly, colorful pins are based on Victorian "flower faces" on vintage greeting cards. The glass marble in the center makes them pop like eye-catching 3-D!
	Our Easter Bunny Basket is a simple - but elegant - paper craft. The basket is an origami-style box. On both sides, a vintage image Easter Bunny guards his treasure and his ears loop up to form the basket handles.
	Fill this Easter Egg Pot with spring flowers for your Easter brunch! The neo-classic design comes from vintage images of little girls with pussy willows, surrounded by gold leaf and a hand-painted frieze of pussy willows - we show you how to make it simple.
	This Easter decoration is a VintageImageCraft exclusive. Paper machè and brown paint transform a balloon into a Victorian chocolate egg confection - with bathtub caulk icing! The beautiful FREE vintage image comes from a 1908 Easter card.

The Many Symbols of Easter

Easter is the most important feast day in the Christian liturgical calendar, celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is a movable feast, occurring on the first Sunday following the Paschal (or Passover) full moon. The date of the Paschal full moon is not determined by looking up at the moon, but by a complex astronomical and mathematical computation of the lunar calendar that only the church and NASA understand. As a result, Easter Sunday wanders around between March 22 and April 25.

The name for Easter is derived from the Germanic name of the Saxon goddess of spring, Eostre. Her animal was the spring hare - the original Eostre Bunny. In non-Germanic languages, the name for Easter is derived from the Hebrew word for Passover, pasch, such as Pascua in Spanish, Paques in French, Pasch in Greek and Russian, and Pasen in Dutch. (That's where Paas® brand egg dye name comes from!)

As a secular holiday, Easter is a celebration of spring; the renewal of nature, fertility, and new clothes. The symbol of the holiday is the egg, a fragile hand-me-down from early pagan religions. Even egg decorating can be traced back to an ancient Persian custom of painting eggs for the vernal equinox (March 21).

The colors of Easter are the pastel colors of spring - the pale pink of cherry blossoms, the yellow of a baby chick, the green of new buds, and the blue of a clear sky. The exception is in countries influenced by the Eastern Orthodox church, where Easter colors tend toward bold reds, golds and blacks. Before commercial egg dye, Easter eggs were colored with boiled vegetable peels, like onions and beets, but by the 20th century, eggs were appearing in all colors of the rainbow.

Beyond the egg, there are many familiar secular Easter images that were first brought together by the Victorians. The rabbit is the famous mascot, due to Eostre's hare and its earned reputation as a fertility poster-child. He is kept busy painting eggs, carrying eggs, hiding eggs, practically everything but laying them. Also joining the animal Easter chorus are baby chicks, birds and lambs, often wearing Easter finery with spats and bonnets. Spring flowers adorn Easter greetings and decorations, such as Easter lilies, tulips, daffodils, snowdrops, crocus, lilac, forsythia, and apple and cherry blossoms. It was, and is, a holiday beloved by children, and vintage images often show rosy-cheeked youngsters gathering eggs in the grass or playing egg games. With Germanic influence, nature-dwelling elves and gnomes start to appear along with the rabbits, chicks and eggs. Easter baskets filled with colorful eggs can be seen in some early greeting cards, but candy like chocolate eggs and bunnies, jellybeans and those strangely unnatural marshmallow Peeps don't join the Easter parade until well into the 20th century.

Never passing up a romantic connection, the Victorians also loved beautiful women on their Easter cards, usually wearing elaborate Easter bonnets or lounging in egg shells.

Did you know...

"Scandinavian witches add humor to the holiday... No home there should be without an Easter Witch that brings good luck and happiness. These witches come in all sizes and ages and have a great fondness for coffee, which they like to brew on rooftops. After they have enjoyed a cup or two, they fly off to the mountain Blakulla where they dance, sing, and make pots of soup or stew... Cards (illustrated) by Jenny Nyström are in high demand as are other well-known Scandinavian artists. The idea of witches at Easter is novel, but then much of the Scandinavian art is unique." From Postmarked Yesteryear, by Pamela E. Apkarian-Russell.

Do you have favorite Easter crafts or card designs? We would enjoy hearing from you with ideas, comments or questions. Please, contact us with a note!