Long weekends are the best. Have you had an Easter weekend filled with chocolate messes and brightly-coloured bonnets? Oh I do hope so, there's something quite wonderful about sharing Easter with a little person. Each little foil-wrapped chocolate is magical, and bunnies with bells are the (anticipated) norm. Collectively, we've moved through the days armed with packets of wet wipes for sticky fingers and chocolate-covered faces.

We had to make an easter bonnet for school. Our first, ever.

We went to the shops to buy supplies but I couldn't bear all the Easter tat: pom pom chickens in their dozens, lined up in an army of toddler madness, glitter-covered styrofoam waiting to be glued to a bonnet with messy abandon, stick-nests and pipe cleaners.

Is it just me?

By the time you added up the cost of all the decorations, you ended up with a costly colour experiment that was going to last one day.  And it is all just the same.

Inspired by a discussion about crepe flowers with an excellent friend of mine, I went in search of crepe paper in all the local stores. Crepe roses! Crepe daisies! Crepe peonies! Audrey Hepburn's easter bonnet wouldn't compare. Alas, there was none. Sadly, pre-Easter weekend must have been a crepe paper frenzy, with reams of the stuff flying off the shelves.

We opted for the readily-available tissue paper instead, supplied in a pack of coordinating easter colours.

We used this basic template for the basis of our tissue flowers. From Rust and Sunshine here.

Tissue paper flowers are magical things. They are quick, easy, and fun for mum and toddler alike. Isla loved pulling at the shapes and the more she crinkled, crushed and squashed them, the better they looked. Baby-proof crafts are rare.
Not quite Audrey Hepburn, but delightfully colourful and not a styrofoam egg in sight. And, because I'm not a complete Easter Grinch, we stuck a few butterflies on with glitter glue.

Isla has worn her Easter Bonnet for a week now, enjoying the bigness and floppiness and floralness of it all. She pulls off bits now and then, distributing the colour around the house in unexpected spots. It even won first place in the class bonnet competition. Her prize? An enormous, almost life-sized chocolate chicken. Sticky fingers all-round.