Easter Egg Tree

My mother has a table top Easter egg tree to display her collection of hanging eggs. I was inspired to maybe start a collection myself and during the 5th week of Lent I decided to look into purchasing a little tree. But then I found this article about Ostereierbaum, outdoor German Easter egg trees. I decided that our young cascara tree would be a good place to start. Another part of my inspiration was the little tin eggs that were offered in the Emma Bridgewater Easter line, so cute!

When I saw the pictures of live trees  covered with eggs I figured it was a good way to use up the bag of plastic eggs I have in the attic. I prefer to do egg hunts with real, hardboiled, decorated eggs and yet I have accumulated all these eggs from church egg hunts and it was the preference of my cousin for Easter Sunday. Too difficult to have my kids sit out just because I think it is too much candy. This is a good way to fill out the tree with eggs since I can only afford a few of the EB eggs. :D

I decided to use ribbon that I threaded through the two holes in the plastic eggs with the center of the ribbon inside the egg so that there were the two loose ends outside which I could use to tie around the branch. This cascara is already leafing out so I knew I could not rely on slipping a loop of ribbon over the baby leaves without damaging them, or worst yet being able to remove them later once the leaves have really filled in.  I used the thinnest ribbon I could find in my ribbon stash and used a wooden skewer to finesse them through the little holes. I started with a small quality of eggs this year as a test run.

I woke up early and was able to get out an hang them while they were all still sleeping. Now I wait for them to wake up so we can bring in the new little chickies for our Easter surprise!