We made an egg carton spring wreath!

This weekend Lucy and I expanded our craftiness by exploring paints and paintbrushes to make a spring wreath out of old egg cartons. It's getting warmer here (finally!) and feeling like spring, and saturday was Earth Day, so it seemed like the perfect time to make something that was both springy and recycled.

I got the idea from here, who got the idea from here, who got the idea from this fabulous Russian blog I can't read at all but has great pictures.

Here's how we did it
(excuse the bad photos. My camera was at the doctor, so these were all taken with my phone!)

1.) I used three old egg cartons and cut them out like this

And then into shapes like this:

2.) We got Lucy decked out in her fantastic paint get up and went to painting. I know nothing about paints, so I used the cheap acrylic paints from A.C. Moore. They were $0.50 each. We used purple, pink, blue, yellow and orange for the flowers and green for the wreath.

Lucy was not wearing blue gloves. Yes, that is paint on her hands. It turns out that she LOVES painting her body even more than she loves painting egg carton flowers.

3.) When we were all done painting, we let the flowers air dry for a few hours

4.) I cut out a wreath from an old cardboard box and painted it green. Sorry, no pictures. It's an inch and a half thick and 12 inches in diameter, and that was the perfect size for the number of flowers we had.

5.) I then hot glued all of the flowers to each other and onto the green wreath. Sorry, no pictures of that either. It's hard enough not to burn my fingers with hot glue when that's all I'm doing, and would be impossible to not burn my fingers while gluing and taking pictures at the same time. And I hate hot glue burned fingers.

6.) Then we hung it on our door

All in all, we're quite pleased with the way it turned out. This might just become a spring tradition for us.