Thrifty Thinking
Hunt around your house to find hidden gems that can become enchanting decor that heralds the impending arrival of warmer weather.
Matthew Mead offers inspiration for creating springtime decor from upcycled goods.
Beautified Basket
A unique basket that has faded over time or, on the flip side, seems too vivid for your country decor, doesn’t need to be relegated to the basement or the bin. Try aging it with a wash made of brown acrylic paint and coffee grounds. Mix paint and coffee with a bit of water to make a thin wash and brush over the basket. Let dry and repeat several times and you’ll find the once-contemporary piece has become classically country in little more than an hour. Adorn the inside with petite eggs, candies, blooms, and hay or straw for a pleasing tabletop arrangement.
Bouquets that Stay
If you’re having trouble arranging spring flowers, look to items that can help stabilize your bouquet. An easy way to anchor the fresh-cut blooms is to fill a glass vessel with a few quail eggs (find at a grocery store or farm stand) and add water. Perky tulips look great grouped in an early American wine glass with the speckled eggs shining through. For a larger arrangement, mix in brown and white eggs, and change the water every other day to retain freshness. Iare t’s the season of renewal: Robins
returning from their wintertime journey, trees are revealing their delicate buds, and daffodils and tulips are awakening from their flowerbeds. There’s no better time of year to keep in step with nature, so do some spring-cleaning and make over little-used items into bright and cheerful springtime decorations. Gather inexpensive goods from thrift stores or search your own stockpile of accents, mix in some craft components, and finish with fare from the grocery store or garden center to assemble egg-ceptional country displays for your tabletops, doors and more.
Decorate your home for a spirited soiree, create gifts for a friend or family member, or use these new creations to introduce a bit of nature’s emerging beauty indoors.
Grain Treasure
Recast an old grain measure with a great farmhouse patina as a beautiful, living centerpiece. Line the measure with plastic and fill it with damp sheet moss topped with fresh mounds of grass (find grass seasonally at garden centers or purchase cat grass at national pet stores). Add in eggs, cut flowers and mini garden statues of rabbits to create a tiny table garden. Water daily and expose to sunshine for longevity.
Barnyard Beauty
Hatch an idea for a whimsical wreath that pays homage to a seasonal symbol and farmyard freshness. We used a premade crafts-store wreath form, but you could fashion your own from chicken wire. Loosely fill the wreath form with dried hay or straw and then tuck about 18 eggs of various natural colors into the bottom. You can paint ceramic or wooden eggs, or blow out the contents of real eggs from their shells rather than toss them if they have reached their expiration date. Top off the wreath with a rustic bow made from seam binding, jute or burlap ribbon.
Hippity-Hopping Chair Rail
Upcycle some vintage gelatin molds with bunny motifs (you might find some with flower designs and egg decorations as well) as a fun and seasonal chair rail. Anchor to the wall with pushpins or sticky wax for temporary display. Hang at chair-rail height in a kitchen or dining room or place an arrangement within a frame or over the top of a mirror.
Perfect Perch
Combining two items in a new way can be the key to creating a novel display with very little effort or expense. Invert an old copper funnel and top it with a bit of excelsior or straw and a small clay bird to fashion an instant tabletop feature for an entry or accent table. A glass or tin funnel would work just as well, and you can find small bird figurines at garden centers, gift shops or antiques malls. Dried straw or hay can be gathered in the fall and stored in plastic bags or bins for springtime use.
Candied Cutout
Revive a cast-off wooden bunny cutout by painting it a fresh carroty orange hue and then hot gluing decorative spring candies right onto its surface to form an eye and detail the ears, tail and toes. Finish with a decorative rosette. Any candy will do, but we used pastel gummy drops. We also trimmed the bottom edge with wrapped carrot-shaped chocolates. To frame the finished piece in shadow-box style, turn a small woven basket on its side and tuck the rabbit in place. If you wrap the bunny and store it in an airtight bin, you should be able to reuse it from year to year.
Tweet Treats
Turn vintage eggcups into table favors full of jelly beans or other small candies. Wrap them in cellophane as a take-home gift for guests at your Easter dinner. Or, fill them with flowers or votive candles to enliven a centerpiece or line a windowsill. You can find eggcups at antiques shops, thrift stores and even at cooking boutiques or department stores.