Easter/Spring Book Page Crafts (Am I Still Talking About Decorations?!?!?)

Okay guys, I know I have no business talking about holiday decorations and crafts. Martha Stewart I am not. But considering I couldn't shut up about my fall decorations last year (a post here, and here, and here, and I would've subjected you to even more posts about my Christmas decorations beyond this tutorial if the end of that pregnancy hadn't been so terrible), let's just say I'm a little obsessed with the topic right now.

It's just, I've come to realize in recent years how much intentional design and decor matter to me, and how much decorating for holidays seems to add to the festiveness and fun of celebrating. In a word, it makes me happy. It was kind of a light-bulb moment for me when I realized my style and criteria for holiday decorations, and then I also realized that I have a bit of an inner crafter in me (shocking!) who actually likes creating and making these holiday decorations, and so this is something I'm getting a lot of satisfaction from right now.


So, I've been spending more time than I care to admit thinking about what I was going to do for Easter decorations this year. I've never really done much by way of Easter decorations, but I'm actively working on ways to make Easter a more meaningful holiday for our family, and decorating is absolutely one way to do that. However, I was a bit stymied when trying to come up with ideas about Easter decor. One of the things I realized last year is that I love holiday decor that already fits in naturally with my every-day decor, but my current color scheme in our main living areas runs heavily to the black-white-and-red combo that I love so much. If you think about Easter colors though, most of them tend to be pinks and greens and yellows, some pastel but some neon bright. Needless to say, Easter colors just don't seem to naturally fit with my current decor so much.

This maybe isn't a huge thing to get hung up on, but I really wanted to come up with something that just fit in a little better, and then as I was scrolling through all the pastel colors on Pinterest I suddenly saw a picture of eggs decorated with book pages, and it was like, flash of inspiration! Because how perfect for me? Book pages are black and white (fitting in with my decor), plus I LOVE book page crafts (some consider it sacrilege, but it just tickles my bookish heart to decorate with bookish art), plus it meant creating stuff! Win-win-win!

So I spent a couple nights last week tearing up one of my books (a used paperback purchased specifically for the purpose of ripping it up) and creating some black and white Easter decor to make a little vignette on my bookshelf. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.

(Okay, excuse the terrible lighting. My apartment gets a depressing lack of natural sunlight, and to make matters worse it was rainy and cloudy today so there was even less light to work with.)

The tutorial I found online for making these (really simple) eggs talked about blowing out real eggs. I had no interest in trying to blow out eggs (maybe it's really simple? it just sounds like a huge waste to me), so instead I picked up a 99 cent packet of plastic white eggs at the craft store, and in my opinion that's the way to go. Now they'll keep till next year with far less chance of breaking. I would link to the tutorial for this, but it's so intuitive it feels unnecessary. Basically you cut up some book pages into little square scraps, grab a sponge brush and Mod Podge, and apply. I wrapped some twine around half of them, just to add a little interest.

After making these eggs and being so pleased with the outcome, I decided I wanted to make a book page flower garland as well. I poked around different flower making tutorials online, and finally settled on this one as being my favorite (i.e., easiest to do), and had some fun making a bunch of these paper flowers.

I hot glued the flowers to some twine and strung it up, scattered my eggs across the shelf, threw in a little ceramic bunny I found on clearance at the craft store, and viola! A nice little black-and-white and bookish Easter vignette. So perfect and so fun!

While I've become preoccupied with holiday decorations, I still very firmly believe in keeping it simple and not doing too much, so beside this vignette the only other decor item was changing up the chalk board art on my wall.

Still pretty clear I'm an amateur at chalkboard art, but my technique has definitely improved a bit since reading this book a couple of months ago.

So anyway, this is so much more than you ever wanted to know about my Easter decorations! (After all those posts last fall, I swore I wasn't going to bore my readers anymore with these kinds of posts, but then I did book page crafts! How could I not share about book page crafts? Just be grateful I'm not hosting Easter dinner this year, because otherwise I would've assailed you with tablescaping plans. You have been spared that.)