Oh Dear!: March 2012

Most of the Western countries have the custom of making this tree, but the trees vary from country to country.
In US the Easter trees are usually decorated with homemade pom-poms, rabbits and Easter eggs.
In Sweden we usually make Easter tree from birch twigs and colorful feathers.

It can stand inside the house, but most commonly outside, just before the entrance.
do you want to make a Swedish Easter tree yourself? Then follow my easy instructions.

You will need

- a bunch of twigs. Traditionally birch twigs, but I took aspen twigs. In Sweden you can buy those twigs everywhere now, but I didn't want to encourage this industry, and nor did I want to cut the twigs from a living tree. So I went to the forest and found a fallen aspen tree. It was quite fresh, which is good, because the twigs are flexible then.

- a bucket or a vase filled with sand, soil or sponge. I used an old tin cookie box filled with soil.

- colorful feathers. I decided to take traditional Easter colors - yellow, orange and fuchsia. But you can take any color really. Purple, green, turquoise - all work perfectly well, and all will create the Easter feeling. I took 50 feathers. You can use less if you have a smaller tree.

- several meters of thin wire (color does not matter - take the one you have at home). You can use leftovers of different wires. Thickness and color are of little importance. Cut the wire into 10 cm (4") long pieces. You will require the same amount of wire pieces as the amount of feathers. (one wire piece per one feather)

First, cut your twigs, so they will be proportional to the vase. The smaller the vase, the shorter the twigs. Mine are about 80 cm long.
Stick them into your vase or bucket. Try to arrange them in a pretty way

Now we will start dressing up the tree. Take one feather and one piece of wire. Wrap two-three time around the feather, make sure it sits well, and use the rest of wire piece to attach the feather to the twig. Wrap at tight as you can.

and then continue until your tree looks "happy". Make sure you have feathers on all the ends of your twigs. But if you want to give it more volume, attach feathers also in the middle as I did.