Pretty and Easy to Make Willow Easter Nests

Pretty and Easy to Make Willow Easter Nests

What have you got planned for Easter? KatchUp, the private photo sharing service for friends and family, invited me to share some of my favourite Easter activities over on the Katch Up blog today, along with lots of other bloggers, so do check the guide out. One of the ideas was an Easter Nest, so I am sharing a full tutorial here today. You might remember I reviewed Katch Up earlier in the year, it is beautiful space to collect and share your favourite photos with friends and family.

My sister in law and I were just talking about how we really must gather up all our Easter Photos, we have a yearly ‘egg roll’, another family tradition you can also read about over on Katch Up – we need somewhere to pool our pics of this event over the years.

Making Easter nests is a lovely craft, for adults or children.

How to Make Easter Nests

These Easter nests make a wonderful table centre piece. They were inspired by a visit to the Judith Blacklock flower school, which has really inspired me to get creative with foliage. Last week I shared the flowers I arranged, this week I thought I would share how to make an Easter nest, an idea I spotted in Judith’s book. Now this is my version, but full credit to Judith for putting the idea in my mind.

All you need is pussy willow, green gardening wire, a small piece of material, a pastil bag of rolled up newspaper, some foliage from the garden, mini eggs and scissors.

Over the summer my daughter and I made willow headresses at Camp Bestival, so the principle was similar. Soak the pussy willow, it seemed fine just in a vase of water overnight, but you can immerse it all if it seems too rigid. Warm it gently with by smoothing your fingers and thumb along it and tease it into a bend, if you try to just bend it without warming it, it will break, creating a sharp corner.

Knot the ends like this…

We made a series of hoops like this, it is hard to tuck the willow buds through, so after a while we decided we would concentrate on the bottom half of the willow and leave the pretty tops for decorating at the end.

I gave up at this point, it was all looking like it would never come together, but when I came back a few hours later, my daughter was sat there and had piled them up, plus someone had remembered that we had green gardener’s wire.

We used a mixture of honeysuckle cuttings from the garden and green wire to weave it all together. Very roughly, but Judith had said that Hebe was a great plant for foliage, and for disguising thing you don’t want people to see. So I was confident we could hide it!

We added some sprigs of rosemary, foliage and pussy willow tips to hide the messy bits. The first time we put the material and eggs in, they all fell through…

So we wove a wire bottom. I think florists make proper wire structures you can use for this, but there was a misunderstanding between me and the florist’s son who was standing in, and I came home with ring oasis instead which I realised when I got home, wasn’t really what I had in mind.

We stuffed an old carrier bag in the bottom to fill in the space and added some material on top. I wanted to keep it natural, and use hessian, but sadly there was none to hand, so we used this pretty floral fabric instead.

And of course, the exciting bit, adding the mini eggs.

My daughter wants to put it in the garden, so real birds can nest in it, I wanted it as a table centrepiece, but we both agreed that mini eggs rule.

Happy Easter, check out my other Easter ideas over on KatchUp and have a fab Easter whatever you do!

Original article and pictures take www.wayfair.co.uk site