We had a lovely Easter, celebrating with family both here in our home and at grandma and grandpa’s house. We enjoyed dyeing and hunting for eggs, did some easy crafts, and ate some delicious food together. My kids took advantage of the rare glut of available candy. We played with cousins on both sides of the family. And Grandma makes amazing ribs! It rained just a little bit, which was a gift. I wish it would rain lots more, but we are nevertheless enjoying the flowers and sunny days we are having during this spring vacation.

My children have another week off from school. Today is a slow day for my workwise, so we’re heading out for a while.

Many blessings of renewal and abundance to you and yours this spring.

Everything is flowering now, it seems, in joyous celebration of the start of spring. How did you celebrate?

My darling husband built me a raised garden bed this past weekend. It’s glorious and 8 ft. by 4 ft. It took a couple of hours to build. I still need more soil to fill it. Seven 2 cubic ft. bags wasn’t enough, but that’s all that would fit in my car. It meant I got to go to my happy place for a brief while, and I refrained from buying much—

Just a tiny six-pack of red snapdragons and one of orange marigolds … you know, for luck.

It’s spring break now and my children have two weeks off school. Today’s project was Clean the Bedroom. (It looks pretty good now.) Yesterday’s projects were more fun:

We dyed Easter eggs, using our hens’ eggs. We started, as you can see, with an assortment of colorful eggs, and only one white one.

It’s good rainbow fun, you know.

Brown eggs and green eggs turn lovely, gentle colors when you dye them.

We also did another springtime project as a surprise for Daddy that I’ll tell you about tomorrow.

My friend Eileen Straiton of Little Acorn Learning and I are very happy to announce that our Spring Festivals E-Book is now available!

This is a teaser mosaic of photos from our e-book. It covers St. Patrick’s Day, Spring Equinox, Ostara, and Easter, and is packed with Waldorf songs, stories, verses, crafting tutorials, caregiver meditations, fingerplays, and stories to inspire you and help you create fun and meaningful festival celebrations with children in your home or classroom.

Part One: Saint Patrick’s Day
Leprechaun Poems and Finger Plays
Irish Blessings
The Four-Leaved Clover
Four-Leaf Clover Hunt
Caregiver Meditation: Luck
Saint Patrick’s Day Kid Craft
Make a Leprechaun House
Simple Shamrock Crown
Irish Stew
St. Patrick’s Day Leprechaun Mobile
Shamrock Window Transparency
The Sunbeam’s Visit
Rainbow Playdough
Jolly Leprechaun Ring
St. Patrick’s Day Paper Ornaments
Clover Suncatcher
The Golden Purse and the Seeing Eyes
To Catch a Leprechaun
Rainbow Science
Dip a Rainbow

Part Two: Spring Equinox, Ostara
To Spring
Seeds and Grateful Spring
Spring Poems
The Story of the Two Seeds
Spring Equinox Wreath
Recycled Bird Feeder
The Feisty Fairy Story
Make a Fairy Pouch with Your Child
Build a Fairy House
Five Little Fairies Finger Play
Homemade Fairy Wings
Spring Bird Puppets
Spring Cleaning in the Home or Classroom
Natural Vinegar Cleaning Solution
Cherry Blossom Festival and Writing Haiku Poetry
Cherry Blossom Branches
Paint Cherry Blossoms
Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry
Pressed Flower Frame for Spring
Flower Pot Compost
Spring Zucchini Bread
Watercolor Flower Wreath
Simple Tissue Butterflies

Part Three: Easter
The Easter Flower and Easter Week
Lent and Sacrifice
Easter Hymns
Five Little Easter Rabbits and other Rhymes
Creating Your Easter Nature Table
Easter from Calendar of the Soul
Caregiver Meditation: Awakening
Little Felted Chicks
Stewart’s A, B, C’s
Flood-Tide of Flowers
Easter Dish Garden
Eggheads
Dyeing Eggs with Natural Dyes
Dyeing Easter Wool
Easter Egg Rolling
Easter Glove Bunny
Paper Easter Bunnies Banner
Felt Easter Ornaments
Decoupage Easter Eggs
Needle-Felted Easter Egg

This volume is the fourth in our series of Festival E-Books designed to help you find a way into the natural and religious festivals that occur around the time of the Solstices and Equinoxes. We have endeavored to provide inspiration and celebration ideas that will help you create fulfilling and joyful holidays in your home or classroom.

Some of the craft projects in this e-book are geared for adults or older children (but everyone can enjoy them). We have written simple instructions and provided step-by-step photographs to assist you. Other projects are simple enough that even the youngest child can assist, for creating art is a fundamental human desire and an important part of learning and expressing ourselves.

Circle-time rhymes, fingerplays, and games are also an important part of learning about our bodies, our world, and our friends. Some of the classic poetry we included may speak especially to the adult caregiver or teacher, for we believe it is through maintaining a sense of wonder and a love of beauty that permits our souls to shine forth in our daily actions.

This volume contains both a nature-based religious perspective, honoring the Goddess of Spring, and a Christian perspective on the holy days of Lent and Easter, celebrating Christ’s resurrection. There is, in our opinion, significant overlap of symbols and traditions, and we feel they can coexist in the context of the spring festivals in peace.

We hope you enjoy our e-book. It can be purchased on the Little Acorn Learning website here, and if you look around on Little Acorn Learning you will find many more delightful products there.

My personal thanks go to my coauthor Eileen, for her can-do attitude, unflagging faith, endless creativity. I’d also like to say thank you to my husband and my children for their assistance, participation, and great tolerance of the many messes my creative projects produce in our home during book production.

Last year, while we were dyeing Easter eggs, we also dyed some plain white wool batting. I am so pleased with the results. In the photo above are a wool colors from both natural and artificial dyes. I’ve saved this wool all year and now I’m making goodies for my boys’ Easter baskets out of it. I doubt that they’ll appreciate the cyclical nature of this, but I do. And don’t forget, this is science! So by all means, get the kids involved.

Materials

• natural dye ingredients (such as turmeric, boiled yellow onion skins, boiled red cabbage, boiled beets, etc.)
• or food dyes from the supermarket
• or Easter egg kit dyes (capsules or powders)
• white wool batting or roving (or get fancy and dye silk cloths to make your own play silks?)
• distilled white vinegar
• mugs or drinking glassware
• spoons

Tutorial

Really, this is totally simple. While you’re dyeing your eggs, add in a good handful or two of wool. We found this was easy to do with the natural dyes as we had a big bowl full of each color, rather than a mere mug full of color.

Onion skins turn wool a pale, golden yellow.

This is the red cabbage dye. It will turn both eggs and wool bluish.

This is beets. It turns the wool a warm light brown. The eggs and wool at first are a beautiful mauve color, but I think they then oxidize and end up brown.

If you are using kit dye or food coloring to dye eggs, you probably have your dyes in mugs or glasses. (Right? That’s the way we always do it.) So you can just keep the dyes for a day or so after dyeing eggs and dye wool in the mugs. You can do handful after handful if you like. We used about a 1/4 cup of distilled white vinegar in each cup, added the dye, and then added water.

Our yellow dye bath was completely exhausted by the wool. None of the color was left when we pulled the wool out. It makes me wonder if the other colors might have done that if we had left the wool in longer.

I suggest keeping your wool in the dye for about 24 hours. When your wool is the color you like, squeeze out the extra dye into the cup, then rinse it in cool running water until the water runs clear.  Set it on a wire rack or pin it to a clothesline outside to dry.

Here are the wool colors we got. I’ll name the colors of food dye baths starting with 12 o’clock: purple, dark red, pinkish brown, blue, yellow, dark green, blue green, and yellow green. It seems to me like the blue should be darker and brighter. It may be that my sons sneacked extra green drops into the blue? In any case, I consider this experiment to be a success because it means any frugal crafter or artist can get a wide range of beautiful, bright colors without breaking the bank, using standard McCormick brand food dyes. I love buying new colors of wool to use in projects, but this is a simple way to get many colors cheaply!

Wool batting doesn’t spin into yarn all that well because the fibers tend to be short. It works very well for needle-felting or wet-felting, however. Wool roving, however, is great to spin or felt.

I’m thinking that a rainbow of simple wee bunnies made from wool we dyed ourselves might be just the thing for Easter baskets this year. What would you make with Easter wool?