Easter Baskets.

Our Mrs Fox's (Easter) Crafty Boxes are on their way and all the crafts will be centred around the egg carton in which the main craft is packaged.  In the egg carton are the main components of the main craft but once these are made, you're left with a very handy box.  We have thought of many things to do with this usually 'recycled in the recycle bin' box.  We have three idea's just for the lids, two of which are specifically dedicated to the main craft.  The third idea we offer for the lid is not.

For this third craft, we suggest that you take the lid (of a 6 egg box) and turn it into an Easter basket.  If you make this yourself, you could present it to your child with chocolate eggs inside or have them use it for an Easter egg hunt.  If your child is one of those rare young beasts (surprisingly I actually know of 3) who don't like chocolate, you might want to choose to put a little gift or two in the box or use gifts in the hunt rather than choccy eggs.

I am going to put a little gift in this box for Eve as she helped me to make it - and then she can use it for the choccy egg hunt that her Aunty Sarah is planning.

I found a lovely little wooden chick brooch on Folksy so I bought one to pop into this basket and then, because my girl can never have enough colouring pens, pencils and crayons, I'm going to add some of these beautiful locally handmade crayons.

You could win a free set for your little ones, just post us a comment below by 23rd March on what you think our other two idea's for the lid of the egg carton are.  We have 4 sets to give away for either the correct idea or for the most interesting idea's - something to do with chicks...

To decorate our basket, we used;

• the lid
• 2 paper doilies
• a sheet of tissue paper
• some paper scraps for petals
• some tiny cuts of felt for the middle of the flowers
• some raffia ribbon.

To make the basket, simply;

1. Smear glue to the bottom and sides of the egg carton lid and place it in the centre of your doilie and then bring the sides up so that they stick.
2. Then cut another in half and stick it round side to the top, flat side folding underneath the lid then fold and stick the sides down. 
3. Next, fold some yellow tissue paper and glue it to cover the inside of the lid.  
4. The flowers on the outside were Eve's idea to make it prettier - cut some small flower shapes from some scraps of paper (we keep all our interesting paper scraps) and stick them around the outside before adding the yellow felt 'pollen' flower centres.
5. With a hole punch, punch holes in each corner of the box and tie the raffia ribbon diagonally across the basket.

If your child is a boy, you could paint the lid to look like a standard punnet and put straw in the bottom (I'm doing this for my 2 boys) or decorate the lid in one of the ways we have suggested in our craft box - more on that one later though... don't forget to send us a comment with your idea on what our ideas might be!