The Jury's Still Out

Everyone who follows me knows that I just love crafting. And so, in an effort to move the to-do list back a little farther, I decided I needed another Easter craft to do this week in between getting ready for the weekend and continuing to celebrate my birthday. I set out to make a very neutral colored bead rope to use in an Easter vignette. But, I didn't know how hard it would be to find the large, unfinished wooden beads. I could find small packages of multi-sized beads but even the largest bead in the bag wasn't as large as I needed. Now I know I could have found them and ordered them from Amazon but that is just not how I roll. When I decide I want to do something, I want to do it "yesterday"-lol

And so, I ended up buying the pastel colored strand at HL. The eggs were almost as hard to find. I knew they carried them at Dollar Tree but I had to go to three different ones before I found them.

I actually like the pastel colors of the beads but, since I had started this idea with a neutral in mind, I decided to try to change their look. The plan was to do the same to the eggs all along because they were pretty generic looking.

It was a simple matter to drill a hole at the small end of the egg using my trusty Dremel-there was already a hole at the other end.

Then I haphazardly painted the antique wax on to the beads and the eggs and let them dry.

The next step was to paint them all white with the chalk paint. Mind you, at this point I really had no idea where this was going.

While I was waiting for all of that to get good and dry, I gave the canvases we will be using this weekend a coat of black paint.

The next step was the messy one. I sanded off a lot of the paint and antiquing. I wanted to just "grunge" everything up a bit.

Then, I put the twine through the very large eye of a needle and began stringing the beads and eggs.

My plan had been to use twine for the tassels but, because these were no where near the neutral color I had envisioned, I just reused the tassels that were on the original bead garland.

So here is where we are right now...and I'm still not sure I like it. Remember, I am not a pastel kind of girl but, if I am ever going to use pastels, it would be for Easter. I am reserving judgement until I start decorating and see if there is some little grouping that is just calling out for this. Stay tuned.

Update: As soon as I posted this picture, I knew they were too "bright and white" for me, so I went back and gave them one very thin dry brushed coat of "mineral" chalk paint. It is a cross between taupe and cream and even with just the lightest touch, I am liking it better. Then, I got rid of the pre-fab tassels and made some with twine and ribbons. Not sure if this will be enough for me or not. We shall see but this is definitely much closer to the original look that I thought I was going for.