Morning, everyone!  Your very own crazy crafter, Jess from Mad in Crafts, here.

Are you cheap?  I am.  I have a little panic attack anytime I see a price tag in the triple digits.   Do you like pretty things?  I do.  When my house is clean and decorated, sometime I just sit and look around at it all.  Partly because I know it will be many moons until it’s actually clean again.  Anyway, because of my remarkable cheapness and love of pretties, you can imagine the internal torment that overtakes me when I visit the Pottery Barn website.  ((shudder))

A few months back I wrote a couple of posts called A Dollar Barn Christmas where I took items I found at my local Dollar Tree and turned them into home decor that was inspired by all the goodies at Pottery Barn.  I was browsing on the PB website a few weeks ago, and got that lovely crafter’s voice in my head.  “I can make that.  I could make that too!” 

I am adding a series of posts on my blog, Mad in Crafts, with tutorials on how to make PB-ripped off Easter/ Spring decor for your home.  The first post in the series showed how to create the elements for a fancy Easter centerpiece based off of two PB catalog items.

Today’s tutorial is redonkulously simple and would be a fun project to do with any bored, little ones you have moping around the house.

To make Robin’s Egg Vase Filler, you will need:

  • 1 or 2 packs of 12 styrofoam easter eggs (Dollar Tree): $1 each
  • craft paint in robin’s egg blue: on hand
  • craft paint in brown or black: on hand
  • paintbrush: on hand
Total: $1

I mixed up a few craft paints until I got a color that I thought made a reasonably good robin’s egg blue color.  Holding each egg by it’s handy little hanging loop, slop some paint all over each egg.  Let dry.  Even though one coat didn’t completely cover, it was good enough.

After your eggies dry, yank the hanging loops out of the ends.  You might end up taking a little bit of the paint and styrofoam with the loop.  You can touch up the paint if you would like, but nobody is going to be looking THAT closely.  Unless you have some really weird friends.  Which I do.

Put the eggs in a cardboard box or on a well-covered surface.  Things are about to get messy.  Dip a bristled paintbrush or an old toothbrush in black or brown craft paint.  If the paint is thick, you will probably need to thin it out, I found.  Flick the paint off the brush and onto the eggs with your pointer finger.  SPLAT!  Kids will love this part.  Keep splattering and rolling the eggs around until each egg has splatters all over it, like so:

Ta Dah!  You just made a rip-off of PB’s Decorative Speckled Egg Vase Filler which is listed as $14 for 12 eggs.  That’s right, friends, you just saved yourself $26 if you made a double-batch.  Plop them in a pretty vase, bowl or apothecary jar and your home is looking more Spring-y already.

Come and check out the rest of my Dollar Barn series (with a special Ballard-Derived feature) this week on Mad in Crafts!  And, not to beg, but comments totally make my day.  :P

 

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