5 Easter & Spring Crafts that are Colorful and Fun to Make

So my first topic today is this plastic charger that I found at Walmart. I just love the colors of it. The price was great. I saw some inspiration and potential in it. So I'm starting out with these 10 words from the dollar tree. There's two packages in. One has the spring in it, the other has blessing. I just thought this would extend it a little bit further than so I just gave it a white base coat with some top paint and then I just wanted to give it kind of a watercolor, faux watercolor because I'm using it so it's pink, but just kind of a faux watercolor treatment like the picture on the charger. So I just went in with some similar color and just watering them down a bit, just blending them together. There's no right or wrong. It's just paint and I'm just blending some together so don't be intimidated by it. It's fun, it's crafty and there's no wrong or right way to do it. So just going in with some of the colors from the inspiration off of the paint and I thought I would just do the pink and purple together and then try and do the green and blue together. So just going in with a little bit of the deeper colors but sticking with some in your light as well and if it does get too muddy or too dark, you can always just stop, let it dry and then give it another try. Even if you have to give it another base coat to give it another try, but definitely worth experimenting with. It's super fun, super therapeutic. I think it's great for the mind to kind of let you be creative and disappear to this creative place, so give it a try. So just going in with some of the green and blue, just same thing, I'm going to kind of blend them to be not exactly half and half but just together and if I need blue and white, whenever you paint blue and white together, sky blue, it always looks like a sky. It doesn't matter what you do, so no wrong or right. So just going in with a little bit of a darker blue just because I noticed the butterfly had that and it was really surprising. And here they are, so I just gave them a quick spray with a matte sealer just to protect the coat so it won't slip off and then I just packed them down with some hot glue and I just thought I'd put them on a little bit of an angle, give it some interest and then I just purchased one of these frame plate display folders from Dollar Tree and that's how I'm going to display it and it looks so great. So it just holds up the plate for me and here it is. I'm very happy with it. I think I'll get a couple months out of it instead of it being something each year I can just use it all season. And then just to let you guys know this video today is part of the Easter DIY challenge hosted by Heidi Thornbull and I'm so excited. She's someone who's been inspiring me for years with all her beautiful scrapbook layouts and then finding her on YouTube and now and with all this inspiration for the DIY project she's going back to some paper crafting ideas which I'm really excited about. She also has a health channel now. She is one busy super lady sure to inspire you. I'll have a link to her channel in my description box as well as the playlist so be sure to check her out if you haven't. She's the queen of DIY. So for my next project I have a place mat. It's from Walmart as well. Same color but kind of coordinates with the charger. So I saw potential in that as well and the price was right on that too. So I'm in Canada. The price might be more in Canada than it is in the States I think but hopefully you guys have these available too. So I just mounted it to a 1 8 inch hardboard. They'll cut these down for you at the hardware store and they are a great bang for buck. Like they're $10 for 4 by 8 feet so you can get lots of panels cut to any size you like. I find to go like a little bit further dollar wise than all those boards at Dollar Tree but you can also glue a couple boards from Dollar Tree together to do this as well. For framing I love, I'm loving these 3 quarter by 3 quarter strips. So what I do is just buy a bunch of 1 by 2s and my dad helps me rip them in half and then you get a bunch of 3 quarter by 3 quarter strips. And then you can frame them any color, paint them any color, they're easy to cut and you can frame anything for way less than a dollar. This probably cost about 40 cents to frame this so I thought that was a great deal. And here it is. Just simple, easy, I thought the picture was so cute I just turned it into a plain piece of art. So here I am with another piece of 1 8 inch cardboard and I just gave it a coat of white chalk paint just as my base coat. And this is another placemat from Dollarama and I thought it was really cute and had lots of nice details. So I thought I would make a picture out of that as well. So here I'm coming in with some light blue paint. So I actually have two tones. So one sky blue paint, I just added a little bit more white to it than the other so I have the lighter one at the top and then I'll just go in with a little bit darker. You might not even be able to really see the difference. I tend to be kind of detailed like that. Of course it's not necessary. Just showing you all the steps you could take, kind of all the possibilities. But of course you can just paint it plain blue too. And then I'm just going in with a light green to do the grass on the bottom and I'm going to go in and add more details on that. But of course you can just paint it green too. This is just for inspiration. So once those dry, I went in with a damp round sponge. So they sell these in a two-pack at Dollar Tree and they are perfect for making clouds. So it's just a damp sponge with some white chalk paint on it and it gives you that perfect little cumulus shape. So you just kind go in and push on the top of it to make some clouds. There's no wrong and right. It's just neat and it should be fun and therapeutic. Not to stress out about it, just have fun. You can paint some little wispy clouds or fluffy clouds, whatever you feel like. And the dampness of the sponge will just wipe away any mistakes you make or you can paint them mistakes. There's really no right or wrong. And then I'm just coming in with some medium green and just a touch of dark green just to add some texture and depth to the draft. And again, I'm just kind of dabbing it around, just giving it some depth and dimension. Again, not necessary. You just do what you like. Use colors that you like. No wrong or right. It's just fun. So then I'll show you what that paint placement looks like if you put it back just on white. So even that's just pretty. You could stop there. But of course, I want to show you all the ideas I have for this project. So I went in with lots of color. So all those spring colors, purple, blue, orange, yellow. And I just kind of did a full watercolor treatment again. So just lots of water on my paintbrush with acrylic paint. And I thought I would just give it a bunch of stripes because the placemat kind of has striped details, like a stripe of dots. And I just thought it would look pretty underneath that. I thought I would line them up, but then I ended up just going for it. I thought it was too tricky to line them up. Of course, you could go for that much detail too though if you're like a really patient painter. You could trace out all the flowers too and do them different colors. But I thought this would look pretty just giving it a And again, it's just fun and very creative. Take your time. I love lots of color, but you could do this just one solid color too. And maybe give it the watercolor technique that just has some kind of texture to it. You could do two colors. You could do anything. The sky's the limit. So I'm just going in with a bunch of random spring colors all the time. Blend them a little bit. Of course, we don't blend together exactly like watercolors because we are just a solid paint, but you could even do some watercolor paint. I think I blended three of these together. I'm going in with some aqua and I think I'm going with like a brighter blue that I was using before. So it's kind of that bright blue of the butterfly and the flowers and stuff that are on the plate. I'm not sure if I'll be displaying this together, but just in case you can kind of pull out colors from each other. So these stripes really don't line up with the flowers or whatever, but I still like it. It still works out. It's so good. I'll just go in with that same paintbrush back down on it. So here I am with the same paintbrush again. And again, just wanted to show you all the ideas. I thought I would add some texture to this as well. So I just go over it with kind of a medium pink color and a little bit of purple and then an even lighter pink that just has some white mixed in. Just giving it some depth and dimension and to make it look like it's kind of watercolor as well. Again, not necessary though. I'm curious to know if you guys recreated this, where you would shop, what you would do. I'd love to hear from you what you guys would like to do with this project. So here it is all together. And then I can't stop there. I'll just show you all the ideas. So I'm showing you how I'm going to frame it again with just those three quarters by three quarters strips. Now there wasn't enough room to put them on top for this project, so I actually glued them to the outside of the hardboard. And it was a little bit of a messy process because I just used hot glue and it didn't give me the best feel. So I did decide just to go in with some twine, which is my YouTube idea. I've seen lots of crafters do it. Never done this before, but I thought well that would be a great way to hide these little imperfect seams. So I just dyed some white cotton twine with some of the paint that I was using just to make it the same color so it blends in. And then I just used some of the craft blue from Dollar Tree. It said it dried clear, which is all I cared about, so I thought I'd give that a try. And it was good. It was really sticky and it did dry clear, so I was happy with that. And then again, just with the blue from the top half, it's a really easy kind of flick. And I just did all those little imperfect seams. Because it's never enough, I thought I'd just show you some more ideas how to dress up this picture. I have a few flowers. The purple ones are both from Dollar Tree. The yellow one is from Dollarama. And then these little Easter pets are also from Dollar Tree. And they're just styrofoam eggs with little sticks in them. And then because I see everyone doing these beautiful bows, I thought, well, maybe I could give it a bow. But I didn't have a lot of wide, wired ribbon, which is, of course, the preferred ribbon to use. So I thought I would just try one with what I had on hand and just kind of make it like a little messy, skinny bow. But I wasn't totally thrilled with how it came out, so I thought I would just show you guys anyway, as options and creations. Would you have used this bow? Like, would you not have used it? Would you make a great big wide, wide ribbon bow? Tell me what you guys would do. I'm always interested to hear some more inspiration, more ideas. So I just went over the little sticks on the pic and painted them, or actually just colored them blue, which I certainly didn't want to do once my glue dried. So I just glued everything down with just some hot glue and just spread them out flat. And then I just came back and made that reindeer log and glued that down. So I think it just adds kind of depth and dimension to the picture. I knew I would be resting it to on a shelf and not hanging it, so I think that was the other reason I was kind of unsure about the bow, just because I wanted to put it underneath this and I thought it would look a little forced sitting on the shelf. So I was pretty sure I wasn't going to use it, but then I found some wired ribbon and I thought, well maybe I should try it with that. And again, just showing you my process and everything I went through with this thing. I just tied it up, thought I'd give it a try. Still not too sure about it. So I did know that I wanted to add a butterfly. These butterflies are also from Dollar Tree. I wish I had a purple butterfly, so I thought, well maybe I'll just add a little bit of purple to the pink one. I wasn't really sure how much I would add, but I just covered up the brown, gave it a couple stripes, and then I thought that was enough. So just again, a little bit of water on my brush to make it look kind of a little bit better. I'm still kind of fiddling with that bow. So I just glued the butterfly down and this is what I ended up doing with. But please let me know if you made this project, or if you're going to make this project, what you would do. I'd love to hear from you guys. I'm also on Instagram, you can tag me on there if it's your project. So here are these foam kneeling pads from the Dollar Tree. And when I saw the colors, I instantly thought, oh that's so spring, so Easter. And I was kind of inspired by those hearts at Valentine's that would fit on yourself. And a lot of people did those charity hearts, kind of ideas with them, with the word. So that's what inspired me. I used these dollars to paint your own eggs, these little woody pieces as my template to get and then I just used those as my template to cut out kind of these old candy eggs. And then I wanted to write some words on them, just like that Valentine's Day. So the trick is to keep your knife sharp. When you're cutting foam, you always want a sharp knife. They do sell this sharpening stone at Dollar Tree as well. So no excuses, you can keep your knife nice and short, nice and sharp. Not a perfect cut, but it does make it a lot easier than trying to cut foam with a dull blade. So then I just cut the bottom to be flat so they can sit on themselves whenever you put them, on your kid's train, whatever you want to do with them. So I did this faux Ray Dunn font on this beanie from default.com and then I knew I was going to do a bunch of them. So I did end up just using a wood burning tool to just easily like go over the words and then get them into the foam. There's so many ideas though, you could do coffee paint words, you could do just regular paint words. There is quite a heavy texture on your foam, so I feel like coffee paint might work the best for that. Or if you have the patience you could just carve them out. That's what I was going to do, but then I wanted a bunch of names so I thought it'd be a lot quicker with the wood burning tool. So it is a little bit tricky to transfer the words to the foam just because it is so soft. So what I ended up doing instead of using carbon paper to transfer, I just kind of poked through the paper. Like I actually let the pencil rip the paper a little bit and then just used it with the pencil to write the word onto the foam. And then you can see the wood burning tool just like melts right through it. It's so easy, it's just like butter. I did turn on a fan to just kind of blow it away. And then I just wanted to have all these for colors so I did end up painting a purple and pink and a green one yellow just so I have kind of all the same colors and I just thought they'd be cute and maybe I'll make a gray as well. So just to enhance them a little bit more I went in with some white paint and I just painted that down into the crevices in the words and then just wiped it away with a damp cloth and it worked perfect. The white paint just stays down into those little crevices. All are finished and they fit nicely on the foam so they work so great. And I think they'll just be a really easy cute little thing to add to your display. On to the next craft. So I'm just stretching my knife so I can get a nice clean cut on my styrofoam. So these are some nesting styrofoam rings from Dollarama and I thought I would just cut them in half and that they would make two really cute rainbow shapes is what I thought of and I was really excited about this idea. I actually wanted to put fabric on them but I couldn't find the perfect rainbow of fabric so I ended up just going with this tissue paper from Dollar Tree and I was really excited when I found it but then I opened it up and the colors weren't true to the advertised colors on the front. They were kind of a little off and funky. There wasn't really a proper yellow but I just decided to make it work anyway. You can see the yellow is kind of greenish and there wasn't really a bright green and the purple's really dark but I made it work. I just went for it anyway. So as you can see cutting through tissue paper you can do a lot of layers really quickly. So I know this is like a thousand circles but it only took a minute or two to even cut through you know like 20-30 sheets at a time. So I just cut out a whole bunch of circles and then I'm just mod podging them onto this rainbow. So tissue paper is perfect because it's so thin and you can manipulate it around the shapes really well. So I did just cut them in this circle shape just to make it easier to take apart. I thought then squares and rectangle kind of shapes I didn't know how I would end those so I thought if they were round it might be a little easier to blend the two colors together because I knew I wanted to do orange and red on the largest and then the green and yellow on the medium and the blue and purple on the smallest one. And then just because I love to show you all my ideas I went in with some more detail and I'm using this like little embossing dots tool from the dollar tree and this is super therapeutic. I don't know if you guys have done dot painting but it's really rewarding and kind of just going to the zone and just paint your dots. I was doing kind of a little flower design with them so just doing a little circle of dots and then I go back in with another color to do the middle of the flower and I just did them in kind of coordinating colors to the tissue paper that I was working on. So just to kind of make the colors all blend together a little bit better because they weren't exactly the colors I wanted but we just made it work and I think it turned out so cute. This is probably my favorite project. I just thought it was such a cute little happy rainbow to paint and I really hope today that I've given you some inspiration and I hope you've seen something that will help you to be creative in the future and if you did I hope you'll subscribe to my channel and if you like this video please be sure to give it a big thumbs up. Be sure to check the description box for the playlist and for Heidi's own book channel if you haven't checked her out yet and I just want to thank you guys so much for watching and I hope to see you soon. Thank you!