What do you do on Easter Eve?

We craft of course!

It's the day before Easter and the weather today was just rainy and dreary. All our outside Easter activities were canceled so we decided to spend some time in the studio. Noticing all the empty egg cartons around the studio from our egg decorating we just had to think of something to do with all them and this is what we came up with.....


These petite little egg carton baskets with pipe cleaner handles....
how cute are these?


You can fill them with treats for your guests or use them
for place card holders for your Easter brunch.


They also make nice egg displays for that egg-stra special egg
you colored this week.


Our mini Swirly bunny loves her new home.


Even hang them on your Easter egg tree to greet your guest.


This basket is embellished with a glitter bunny made from
a Martha Stewart punch.


the possibilities are endless.
We want to wish all of you and your families a
most eggcellent Easter Sunday!
~Lianne & Paul

Easter eggs & crafts with the kids

It's been a busy few weeks around here with school vacation and preparing for Easter, all while we are in the middle of a major reorganizing project in our studio closet (we'll post pictures of that project soon). With Easter only two days away we wanted to squeeze a few fun projects for our little ones this week.


egg decorating:
Always a fun treat and the kids love it but this really requires a lot of preparation ahead of time if you want to do the really fancy stuff so we just stuck to the basics. We had approx 5 dozen eggs - half of them boiled while the other half were blown out.


Our little guy always prefers his hands for dipping the eggs instead of the wire holders.


Our two year old got the hang of it very quick and then became very bored with the whole thing.


The white eggs turned into colored eggs very quickly!


Letting the eggs drip dry on a styrofoam piece with tooth picks works really well. We got the idea from a similar one we found on the Martha Stewart site.












Craft projects:
Today we spent the morning doing some quick craft projects. Our two and our five year old's attention span for doing craft projects is very limited these days, so the faster the project is the better.

We made paper eggs and painted them with water colors and dot markers.


This fun paper bag birds nest idea from Family Fun magazine was a perfect quick project for the kids. We spent some time outside collecting branches in the yard and glued them on a crumpled up paper bag.



it's another way to display your painted eggs.


How funny are these little bunnies! Using a white paper bag, some googly eyes, white and pink felt, stickers and pom poms (for the tail) you can make your own cute bunny puppet!

Happy Easter Crafting!!

Have you ordered your Swirlies yet?

Easter is quickly approaching and the deadline to get your Easter order in for one of our handmade swirly ornaments is this Sunday April 17th. So hop to it!

Things we LOVE! EASTER edition

With Easter only two weeks away the weather here is starting to get warmer and more springlike!!

We are planning a date to decorate our 4 dozen of eggs with the kids very soon!

With our Easter/Spring collection finally completed and online, we thought this would be the perfect time to share some of our favorite Easter treats we discovered this season..so we're calling it Things we LOVE! Easter edition.


We LOVE Paper
We enjoy playing with paper on our down time when we aren't using clay. Looking around the studio lately we have piles of cool scrapbook/color paper that just screams at us to create something. We created some fun paper eggs for one of our Easter trees. We added one of our Easter Greeting banner that was left over from our ornaments.



We LOVE other Crafters
Especially ones who create whimsical unique Easter designs. It's a little challenging finding interesting and different Easter designs but when we came across these fun characters from Vintage by Crystal we just had to adopt a few for our own collection. We have met Crystal at a few of the local craft shows we've been at over the years, and seeing her work in person and chatting with her you can tell she really enjoys what she does.



We LOVE Easter Decorations
Every holiday we always visit and checkout all the stores holiday merchandise to see what's new out there. The store we think that caters to seasonal/Holiday decor really well is HomeGoods . It is constantly changing merchandise and bringing in different items for every season. The trick is that every store is a little different so we will end up hitting 4 different HG stores to find something. This season we found this wooden Happy Easter sign and a bunny carrying a little bunny figurine that is white flocked glittered.


We LOVE Color
A Springtime color palette of pale blues, greens, pinks and yellows how always makes us smile. We purchased a new shelf unit for the studio for that exact reason! We wanted to display our paints in color groups to admire and get inspiration from.



We LOVE mini Trees
This is where we might be considered hoarders. But we can't resist a mini tree! So whenever we come across a new or unusual tree we can't help ourselves. Just looking around the studio right now we have 19 trees. Anyway, our latest find is a small white tree we found at Target for only $2.50. How could we have NOT picked one up...liked it so much we bought 2!
And it's not everyday you come across a purple glitter tree.


How fun is this little Lindts chocolate gold bunny car!

We LOVE Candy
What's Easter without some yummy candy. How cool are these vintage inspired foil bunnies look all decked out in their bunny suits. We make a special trip to our local chocolate shope each year to pick up these little guys based on the way theylook alone...the good thing is they taste as good as they look. Presentation is everything!



We LOVE Magazines
We have mentioned in many posts before how much we adore holiday magazines and even though we only came across a small handful this year, the ones we did find didn't disappoint. Each magazine if choc full of fun inspiring Easter and spring projects. If you enjoy ornaments as much as we do you might want to check out Celebrate 365 which is a quarterly magazine about about holiday ornaments. If you know of any other magazines we should check out email us and let us know.



We LOVE Easter Crafts
Papier mache eggs are a must for any craft studio. There so many things you can do with them! You can glitter, decoupage or paint them. You can create an Easter scene inside them. The ideas are endless. The dark paper eggs are from D. Blumchen & Company and the cream color are from Martha crafts which we can't seem to find anymore. Also from Martha crafts are the bunny paper punches.


We LOVE Easter Specials
If there is a show about Easter... were watching. It could be a food special or a classic old school kids special. We love it! So you can guess how egg-cited we were when we found out that this year we get to see two new specials to enjoy. A new Easter movie HOP and a new Martha Stewart eggcellent Easter special on the Hallmark channel this Sunday April 17th


Would you like to add to our list? Please Share your favorite thoughts of the Springtime season.
Happy Easter Everyone!


** Everything we mention above is Swirly Designs personal opinions; we were not paid or asked to promote any of these items/products we talked about.

Hippity Hop Hooray!

Your ornaments were shipped today!!

Happy Thursday everyone! It's always crazy after we launch a collection online.
Yesterday was the first of many trips we will be taking to the post office in the next few weeks. This picture shows only part of Monday's orders. More went out today.

So for everyone who placed an order, we thank you again and you should be receiving them from your local Easter bunny real soon. For anyone who is still thinking about it, there is still time to get your orders in check out here to see what few are still available.

More Easter & Springtime beauty shots

Well we managed to get a few hours of sleep before waking up to orders coming in. We are so happy with the turn out for this years Easter & Springtime collection.

This is truly one of our favorite holidays. If you happen to have stopped by and checked out our designs, we would love to hear your thoughts! Please leave a comment on our blog or on our facebook page.

Here are some more beauty shots of the collection that didn't make it on website. We took approx 500+ shots of the ornaments for the website which is rather extreme, but because the collection is limited and a lot of the designs sell out we really need to document the images before they leave the studio for their new homes. Enjoy and thanks again to all you loyal early birds... you started ordering in the wee hours of the morning! We're happy to send our Swirly Designs off to new homes!




Hippitty Hop ornament




Swirly Bunny


Spring Bloom


Spring Hoot!


Easter Sweets


Home of Mr. Rabbit


Easter Greetings Egg Topiary