DLTK's Holiday Crafts for Kids
Easter Egg Wreath

The diameter of the completed wreath is about 15 inches.

This craft is fun for older children (and adults!) - Age 6+.  There are quite a few steps that younger kids (Age 2+) can help with, but they won't be able to do the craft independently.  This is a good family project!

This fun Easter wreath is made with, you guessed it, TP ROLLS!!  Everyone in my family has been collecting them for me and we ended up with a whole bunch of extra ones.  This is a great way to use the extras.

Materials:

• Wire coat hanger
• 14 to 16 tp rolls
• printer,
• paper, 
• something to color with (we used wax crayons and water color paint for a very nice effect)
• tape,
• glue,
• scissors
• Optional:  Easter color paint  - if you just get red, white, blue and yellow you can mix all the colors we've used here.  Just use lots of white for the pastel effect.

Instructions:

• ADULT:  Take each tp roll and cut a slit HALFWAY through.
• Optional:  Paint tp rolls pastel colors.  Both of my girls (ages 3 and 7) love playing junior scientist and mixing their own colors
• Let dry.
• ADULT:  Bend the coat hanger to form a circle.
• Using the slits cut halfway through the rolls, slide each of your tp rolls onto the hanger to form a big circle of tp rolls.
• Optional:  Take a bit of masking or scotch tape and tape the tp rolls together.  (tape the openings of the tp rolls on the inside of the circle together).  This will keep the rolls from spinning around while you're working.  If you choose not to do this, the paper leaves will keep everything from spinning on the finished craft.
• Print out the template of choice -- I've provided 3 different easter egg designs plus a "blank" easter egg template for the children to make their own designs.  We used 8 eggs for our wreath -- there are 4 eggs per template.

Color the eggs how ever you like... here's how we did it:   

• color the fine detail (the designs) with WAX crayons -- crayolas don't work well in this case because they're more "chalk" based than wax based (most of the time that's a good thing as they don't flake like wax crayons do).  To know you're getting wax crayons, buy the cheapest ones you can find *grin*.
• Now water color paint right over top of the egg (right over the wax crayon).  The water color paint won't stick to the wax crayon and it gives a very nice effect... just like you died the egg.
• Use WHITE crayon too!  It's almost like writing secret messages...  It doesn't show up until you paint over the egg.
• This wax crayon technique works on real easter eggs...  It's similar to the bee's wax idea used to make Ukranian easter eggs!
• Glue all the eggs onto the tp roll base, overlapping so it's nice and full.
• Tie a bow on the top if you want to.  (We have one bow that we "recycle" for all of our tp roll wreaths).

Templates:

• Close the template window after printing to return to this screen.
• Set page margins to zero if you have trouble fitting the template on one page (FILE, PAGE SETUP in most browsers).
   
  

Egg Template 1 - simplest design    (color)   or   (B&W)
for the youngest children

Egg Template 2 - regular design   (color)   or   (B&W)

Egg Template 3 - daisy design   (color)   or   (B&W)

Egg Template 4 - no design - "blank"    (color)   or   (B&W)
design your own!

Printable version of these instructions