Leggi questo post in: Italiano
Happy Easter Monday! Hope you had a lovely day yesterday! And if you have children, I’m sure you now have insane amounts of candy and chocolate in your home. Here in Italy there’s no Easter Bunny, but kids get these huge chocolate eggs with a little gift inside. The eggs are wrapped in big squares of fabric or, more commonly, foil wrapping, similar to the type used for gift wrapping.
It drives me nuts to have to throw away all of that wrapping, so I always flatten and fold it the best I can, and put it aside for wrapping future gifts or, as my kids prefer, for making easy recycled crowns that are shiny and fun! Oh, and did I say easy? Well, let me say it again, because you get a LOT of kid satisfaction from this 5-minute project! And it’s pretty mamma-satisfying, too, because by using upcycled materials, it’s totally free! Woohoo!
In order to make these crowns you need:
- a big sheet of upcycled foil wrapping (from Easter eggs or gift wrap)
- strips of lightweight cardboard (in Naples, they put these in packages of fresh pastries to keep the wrapping from touching the gorgeous creams and other decorations, but you can use any bendable cardboard)
- glue
- a big paintbrush
- scissors
- a stapler (not pictured)
- permanent markers
- glitter glue.
Let’s get started!
Use the paintbrush to cover one side of the cardboard strip (the outer one, if it is curved) with glue and stick it on to the non-silver side of the foil wrapping, close to one edge. (picture 1) Make sure that the wrapping is not wrinkled or creased underneath the cardboard. Press with your hands and flatten out any wrinkles.
Now cover the other side of the cardboard strip with glue, flip it over and flatten it out. (picture 2) Make sure that the foil is folded right along the edge of the cardboard.
Cut out the cardboard strip and discard the rest of the foil (or use it for another crown).
Wrap the strip around your intended royal person’s head and staple the cardboard strip into a circle.
Cut little triangles out of the top of the strip (not the folded side). If you make a few of these crowns, your floor will end up looking like this.
Use permanent markers to decorate the crown however you want.
Apply some glitter glue over the marker decorations to make it extra sparkly.
Make a couple more, let the glitter glue dry and…
…let your kids have fun in their pretend world!
You can get as fancy or stay as simple as you want. If you’re lucky enough to have gold-covered cardboard, you can just make super quick crowns from that. Or let your kids go wild decorating their crowns!
Oh, and guess what? You don’t have to be a kid to have fun with shiny crowns! Mammas like to be queens, too!
Princes and princesses also love getting ice cream!
If you get a nice egg, it will be probably wrapped in some sort of fabric. I’ve been getting organic fair trade Easter eggs from the AltroMercato for years, and I just love the heavy paper wrapping they have because it’s pretty and resistant. You may remember seeing this paper on my post on how to make upcycled gift tags, because I love wrapping gifts in this paper and tying up the package with a big ribbon.
Someone once commented to me that it’s possible to iron used wrapping paper to get all the wrinkles out, so I gave it a try with this heavy paper Easter wrapping. All it took was a hot iron with a protective ironing cloth, and my wrapping paper got perfectly flattened out! Now my wrapped packages will look even nicer! Hooray!
Question of the day: Did you stuff yourself with chocolate on Easter?
We now have tons of chocolate at home, and this year we got an super yummy beer-cream-filled-colomba, a traditional Italian Easter cake. But I’m not really a sweets-person, so the thing that I got super excited about eating were these hilarious chick eggs that the woman who helps out my in-laws made. I don’t eat meat, so I ended up eating four of them to make up for not eating the main course!
