Tag Archives: home-decor

Easy Moss Crafts for a Beautiful Easter

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Easter is on April 5th this year, 2026. Although it is still 2 months away, I recently thought about some Easter creations. I made them with plants and moss a few years ago.

You can use sheet moss, Spanish moss, reindeer moss, mood moss, sphagnum moss, or faux moss. In my examples below, I used two or three types of natural live moss.

Easter Moss Wreath with Grape Vine Bunny Ears

Round Metal 12″ Wreath Frame
Natural Moss (different types)
Natural Grape Vine Twig Garland
Green florist wire
Ribbon

Making this wreath was rather easy. It does make a mess though because the moss will scatter bits here and there. I made them in my greenhouse. The moss was live natural moss I had in my stock. Moss can be kept in cardboard boxes in a cold environment, like an unheated garage. Some florists keep moss in their florist coolers. The wire wreath frame was in my stock from prior years of making holiday wreaths. I also had some florist wire from before. And the grape vine twig as well. At first, I didn’t know how to make the bunny ears, and the grape vine came to mind. Attaching the moss with the florist wire by just repeat wrapping is simple. The grape vine was bendable to I attached it to the wire frame as well.

I attempted to make bunny ears by using coat wire hangers and bending them into the bunny ear shapes. It worked too but was more time consuming. I preferred the grape vine ears instead.

I also like the look of just a simple natural moss wreath. There are actually several different types of mosses used in the wreath made shown above. Moss gives me a feeling of just enjoying nature. It is earthy, has an almost like soil smell, and pliable. If the moss needed a little moisture, just lightly spray it with a water bottle sprayer. Outdoors it lasts for months if not indefinitely. The moss on the one in the photo above was a combination. It included mood moss, which is wavy looking, and sheet moss. Sheet moss pulls apart in pieces. It works well to wrap a piece or section of it around the metal wreath frame. Then using florist wire, I just wrapped the florist wire around the tops. The florist wire, which was green, disappears as it gets pushed into the moss somewhat.

Square Wreath with Bunny in the Center

Square Double Rail Metal Frame
Natural Moss (different types)
Faux flowers
Green florist wire
Raffia ribbon
Cardboard (used either an empty cereal or beer box)

This one was made on a square wreath frame. In the center, I made a bunny. I cut a bunny shape using cardboard and used glue gun glue to glue moss over the bunny shape. It was rather easy and then I attached it in the center. The yellow flowers are faux material. It came out rather cute. The bow was made with natural raffia ribbon.

Next, is a bunny cut out project fun and simple to do with kids.

Bunny Sticks with Moss

Sheet moss
Glue gun with glue sticks (or other type of glue)
Raffia ribbon
Cardboard (used either an empty cereal or beer box)
Popsicle sticks
Green spray paint

Another crafty bunny idea was these moss bunny cutouts. I thought how this is an easy and fun project to do with kids. First, I cut the bunny shapes out using cardboard. I found that beer cases, like Budweiser beer boxes really worked well. It was easy to cut shapes with that type of cardboard. Or you can use empty cereal boxes. Wooden Popsicle sticks were used as the stick part. Then these can be inserted into things like potted plants or whatever. Again, I had natural raffia ribbon on hand to make the bow for the bunny’s neck area.

That year I decided to make kits with all the components to sell. I had spray painted the bunny cutouts with green spray paint. This helped to hide the print of the cereal box. I left the other side bare. It was a very easy and fun craft to do with kids. Use your imagination. Add eyes or a bunny tail!

The next project is hanging glass globes.

Hanging Glass Globes with Succulents and Bunny Figurines

Natural moss (recommend any type except Spanish or Faux Mosses)
Hanging Glass Globe
Decorative small bunny figurines
Faux decorative Easter eggs
Live plants (hens and chicks, jades, donkey tails, echeveria, or other succulents)
Potting soil (small amount recommended)
Activated horticulture charcoal (optional)
Glue gun with glue sticks (optional)
Round wooden craft like disk (size of a quarter, optional)

Before you start, be sure your decorative bunny figurine fits into the hole of the glass globe. Succulents can live in natural moss. The roots will naturally grow into the moss and the bit of potting soil below it. The activated horticulture charcoal, which is infused with oxygen, helps absorb odors. It is an optional item. If you don’t have any, don’t worry too much about it. But if you decide to use the charcoal, place a little bit of it over the well-draining potting mix before the moss layer.

The round wooden disks I mentioned in the items list are the size of a quarter coin. I used them to glue my bunnies onto. This helps stabilize them. I used some glue gun glue to attach it to a disk. Then I inserted it into the hanging glass globe. I do not recommend dry mosses that tend to rot which is what I feel Spanish moss does. Spanish moss may be green or light tan brown and it looks stringy. When it gets wet, it tends to stay too wet for the succulent plants. I prefer the other types of natural living mosses like sheet moss, mood moss, or others noted above.

The moss is the next step, tucking it around the bunny and onto the potting soil. Then comes adding the tiny succulent plants. Most of these were cuttings or really small hens and chick plants (Sempervivums). If you think the plant won’t stay in place, add a tiny dab of glue gun glue underneath. This will help secure it.

In this example next, I acquired tiny little bunny decor. So cute!

Are these little, tiny bunnies adorable or what? It made the project so cute. The nice aspect of these hanging glass globes is they function like mini terrariums. The succulent plant will grow very slowly. Once you are done with the Easter decorating season, you can remove all if you wish.

Add items you have on hand. Perhaps you have some nice stones or twigs to add. A pretty ribbon to hang it with or twine. You are only limited by your imagination. These make adorable gifts for your Easter dinner hostess. Every once in a while, add a tiny bit of moisture to the moss and let it dry between. You do not need to water it often. Only enough for the tiny root hairs of the small succulent plants. I’m talking less than a shot glass of water. Less is more with smaller hanging glass globes. I do not recommend spraying the moss with mists of water, it will only get the glass stained. The idea is minimal damp moss at times. If you wet it too much, things will rot.

Sometimes maneuvering my fingers into the globes was difficult. Tweezers or long bamboo like sticks can help. Use them to position items as needed. Once completed, hang them in indirect sunlight inside the home and away from super cold drafts. Remember, when including live plants, glass vessels are like mini environments. The open hole allows for air, and you will lightly water the moss at times. Don’t overdo the watering. If you happen to put too much water in there, carefully tip your glass globe to drain it out. Allow the moss to completely dry between watering cycles. Succulents can go for weeks without water.

The next project is making a centerpiece with live perennial plants.

In the background, you can see a terrarium fishbowl. Just like the hanging glass globes, the base components are important. Use the potting mix (well-draining types), activated horticulture charcoal, and live moss. A drainage layer, like pea gravel is beneficial as well below all of that. You can see I put a live orchard in the glass fishbowl terrarium. The pea gravel is important when using larger plants to allow for drainage in the vessel you use.

The last project shown is a big silver bowl with two plants. One is a Helleborus perennial. You start to see these at nurseries and stores during Easter time. Also commonly available are tulips. I just tucked each of these live plants into the silver bowl in their original growing nursery pots. Then, I used moss to cover that up. Then the fun part is just adding your own Easter decoration. By the way, the perennial (common name is lenten rose) takes partial to full shade and flowers March thru April. The leaves are evergreen and will stay green outdoors. They are one of the earliest perennials to bloom. They are also deer resistant.

Hopefully this post inspired you for the Easter season to come. Go get your supplies now so you can enjoy making them before the season arrives.

Cathy Testa
Date of this post: 2/10/2026

Cathy had a small business focused on container gardening. Today she and her husband are retired. They like to go camping so camping topics are being added to this blog site. Also, Cathy likes making holiday decor and is sharing some of her creations here as well. Some with plants and some without! Thank you for visiting.

Creating a Festive Air-Dry Clay Tree: Step-by-Step Guide

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As mentioned in a prior post on this site, I started playing with air-dry clay to make holiday decorations. It is more about crafting therapy for me. I find working with my hands, even on simple crafts, allows my mind to relax. I suffer from tinnitus (ear ringing) and when I’m focused on something else, it relieves my symptoms at times.

One fun creation was this holiday tree I made which is festive and fun. The colors are bright and vivid. It was an experiment and rather easy yet very fun to make!

Air-dry clay can be found on Amazon of course, like almost everything else! This one is labeled as:

36 Colors Magic Clay Nature Color DIY Air Dry Clay with Tools as Best Present for Children Toy for Kids.

It arrives in little packets of 36 different colors. The packets, more like pouches, are 0.45 oz each. They are plastic packets which seal on the top to help the clay from not drying out. The clay is light and is not baked after making something with it. It naturally dries to what I think feels like a hard foam of sort. It was about $8.99 to get the magic clay, as they called it.

This is what I made with the clay recently. I like the colors. Festive, fun, and “Who-ville” like in my mind! I decided to use a Styrofoam cone center. I wrapped the cone in plastic wrap and began to create.

I selected colors one by one. I thought I should place a type of green color between each vivid color. Working from the bottom up. I would take clay out of the packet. I rolled it into a worm-like shape. Then I wrapped it around the foam. Remember, the foam also was wrapped in plastic wrap.

I connected the worm-like shape to form a ring around the foam for each layer. The ends were going to be attached. This would leave a line at the connection point. I decided to make that line at a different place for each “ring.” This way, I could add a little ball over that line. Hopefully this is making sense. I didn’t want each ring’s connection point to have a line all the way up. They should not be in the same place on the tree.

When I got to the top, I put a ball on top to finish it off. Each ring rolled out on a board before applying it to the cone was therapeutic to me. I put on a holiday movie and just enjoyed the whole process. Again, I worked from the bottom up.

Air dry clay dries slowly. I have found when I made other three-dimensional items, they flop as they dry. The idea of using the foam center as a mold was to keep the tree upright as it dried out.

I let the air-dry tree stay on the foam center for about two full days. I started to contemplate adding my other little ornaments I made. These include the Santa. I decided not to add them to the air-dry clay tree.

The flat ornaments I made of the Santa, stocking, and gingerbread man were fun to make too. In the end though, I think I loved making the festive funky color tree the best! I ended up making the other items (the Santa, stocking, gingerbread man) into ornaments to hang on my tree.

The last step of the tree was to remove the foam center. I gently tugged on the plastic wrap and eventually it came out. The center inside the tree was still damp. It slowly dried and the tree did not flop. If you put plastic wrap on the foam, leave a tail at the bottom end. This ensures you can grab it by the plastic wrap to pull it out of the air-dry clay tree. If tugging at the plastic wrap does not work. Take a tool to poke up the foam form on the bottom to try to grip it out.

As I worked on the tree, I started to add the balls for each ring. This was done to cover where the worm-like rings connected. Don’t wait too long to add the balls. It is best to add them while the clay is still damp so it sticks.

Here is the underside of the tree. This was another easy craft to make. The key is using colors that work together. And just enjoying the process.

Hope you enjoyed this post!

Cathy Testa

Date of Post: 12/20/2025

Simple Steps to Create Holiday Decor Balls

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I discovered a very simple method to make pretty holiday balls using a Styrofoam ball and holiday ribbon! I wish I had discovered it earlier. I would probably have many of them to put on my Christmas tree.

Supplies needed:

5″ Styrofoam ball or bigger if you wish
Holiday ribbon (I used 2″ wide solid gold ribbon)
A wooden dowel like tool with pointy end (a bamboo skewer would work)
Sharp scissors
1 piece of twine (3″-4″) to make a loop to hang

Video:

At the very end of this post is a video showing how I inserted the ribbon pieces. Scroll down to see.

Steps:

Cut the ribbon into pieces (see below). I went with between 5-6″ lengths. I believe I cut at least 60 pieces from the ribbon roll I had on hand. I wanted to do red, but my red ribbon on hand was shear and shiny. I knew the “white Styrofoam ball” would show through sheer ribbon. Cloth pieces can be used as well, but using ribbon for me was super easy. I grabbed a roll of the solid gold ribbon I had in my craft stock. I used sharp scissors to cut pieces 10 at a time.

Golden Ribbon above on a roll. It was wired ribbon, but I don’t think wired ribbon would be required.

View of the 2″ wide ribbon

View of the ribbon pieces. I cut the pieces on an angle on the ends. Also, I suggest you keep all the ribbon cuttings the same size so make a uniform ball.

Next step is getting the 5″ Styrofoam ball. And having your wooden dowel tool ready. I had some florist like long plant sticks on hand with one end is pointy. Trying to think of tools you already have on hand. For example, I think a bamboo skewer would work. Basically, anything that is somewhat long and has a pointed end. I don’t think anything “metal” would be good, it would poke thru the ribbon.

Take a piece of ribbon and push the center of it into the ball using the wooden tool. The tool does not poke thru the ribbon. Just pull the dowel tool away when you sense the ribbon piece is secure in the ball.

I believe I used at least 60 pieces of ribbon to cover the entire ball. I kept inserting each piece near the next until the ball was completely covered.

When you get to a place where you would want a piece of twine to hang it, make a loop with the twine and tie it together and put it with the ribbon to push it into the ball.

When you completely finish covering the ball, it looks like this.

You could imagine if you made several of these, you could put them in places in your tree to make it a nice design. As I mentioned before, I wanted to make red balls, but I didn’t have the red ribbon on hand.

Nice material can be used. If you had some type of cloth and cut that into pieces. It’s pretty easy to do. A a bit time consuming but I was enjoying it – to me it is Craft Therapy!

I ended up hanging the gold ribbon ball I made and it looks cute. There are possibilities with this craft item. They can be tied together like garland if you made several. They may be hung from a chandelier. Any color can be created.

Hope you give it a try!

Cathy Testa
Container Crazy CT
Date of this post: 12/19/2025

Using the dowel, insert each piece of ribbon by pushing it into the ball.

Creative Uses for Citrus Peels in Crafts

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I discovered a way to make a cute wreath with citrus peels. I saw a lady do this on a social media feed and thought how cute the wreaths looked, mostly for fall and Thanksgiving season, however. Also, it is kind of neat because using citrus peels is like recycling something that would have ended up in the trash or compost.

Another bonus is my husband really enjoys eating citrus fruits. And this time of year, pomegranates are in the grocery stores, so I used those as well. The darker red peel color worked really well against the colors of the oranges, clementines, even grapefruit. You could use limes or lemons as well.

It is super easy, and I happen to have crimped single wreath rings in my stock of craft supplies, but this could easily be done with a clothing wire hanger cut and formed into a circle. I had my husband cut my crimped wire frame so I could push the peels onto my wreath frame, and I got underway.

Anytime he or I had an orange or other citrus fruits as a snack, I asked him to save the peels. Then I tore them into pieces. It doesn’t matter the shape or size of the torn pieces. Can be random.

Above you can see the pomegranate peels, and I believe next to it is the grapefruit peels. It sure did smell good when I pushed the grapefruit peels onto the wire.

I did like grouping them, so all the peels were facing the same direction as it added more color.

In this photo above, I did some back-to-back and didn’t really like it – I preferred all the same direction to add more color so all the peel-colored sides face the same direction as they were stacked on.

This was when I finished. I just needed to add a bow. I think this is a great wreath to make for Thanksgiving. And they probably would be adorable in an even smaller wreath size. I think this was a 10″ wreath frame size. There are so many decorative options with this – could do some embellishments if you liked for fun.

My husband made this loop at one end and then made a little hook on the other to reattach the frame ends together when done putting all the peels onto it.

There are the pomegranate seeds and a clementine also used. They were yummy together – and pretty colors. It just takes a while to collect all the peels. I would just keep them in a bowl and then try to attach them to the frame rather quickly before they were too dry.

I forgot to take a pic of the bow part and now it is stored away since we are onto Christmas decorations. But this was an easy, affordable, and creative little craft project. I recommend wearing gloves because the wire started to blacken my hands while working on it – due to probably the acid of the citrus – I don’t know.

It dries naturally and smells nice while it does so. I suppose you could add essential oils on it later to add more fragrance to it.

Cathy Testa

Date of post: 12/6/2025

And PS – sorry I didn’t post this sooner. Making this in early November is best timing. Good one to remember for next year.

Crafting for Therapy: My Pinecone Wreath Journey

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Hi all,

It’s December 2024 – Wow! Only about 4 weeks till Christmas. Usually, in past years, I was one busy, hyper, nervous woman preparing fresh holiday greens for an upcoming huge holiday workshop during this week, but I stopped doing that during Covid year. And now I’m in a new stage of my life, being retired. I still plan to post on this plant related blog from time to time, but this year, I didn’t post that much. I was in a funk. Family drama entered during the first year of my retirement and my husband’s – such is life, sometimes timing can mess up the best laid plans. I am hoping 2025 will bring better days, but in the meantime, I do find that creating crafts is a form of therapy. So, on my sad days recently, I thought to myself, “Make something – anything. Even if it doesn’t come out good.”

When I worked on my fresh greens for those prior big holiday workshops consisting of teaching how to make wreaths, kissing balls, and other beautiful holiday items, it was my holiday too, but I was always nervous too. Will I run out of fresh holiday greens? Do I have enough for all the attendees? Will the greens last? Sometimes, I over purchased greens or holiday craft supplies like ribbons, berries, pinecones, or whatever used to embellish the wreaths and kissing balls made in workshops or for my special orders just cause of the fear of running out. So, after 20 years or so of doing my holiday workshops, I did end up with some extra “supplies” in my stock room. Thus, I could craft now by myself for another 10 years probably – LOL.

I saw one day a candy cane wreath made of pinecones on a social media feed, and I thought, hey, I have plenty of pinecones still in my stock. And I have 3 frames left in my stock shaped like candy canes. Pinecones are something I would just gather in the woods mostly. Sometimes I purchased them from a wholesale supply house if they were special, like those with silvery sparkles, or an extra touch with berries or whatever.

Thus, I made this candy cane pinecone wreath using a wire frame recently (see photo below). It was easy in ways but tricky with the hands. I just pushed some pinecones I had (faux and real) that were already batched in 3. Three pinecones wired together previously. I used two types and fenagled them thru the wire frame and then just used standard florist wire to secure. The backside of this candy cane wreath is sloppy – but I didn’t really care, cause first of all, you can’t see the back, but I also didn’t care, because I was doing “craft therapy.”

I have some of that moss in stock too – it is a dry type, and I grabbed bits of it and tucked it around. I also have some of those larger red balls and I love those and added some here and there, then added a premade curly bow. I used some glue gun glue to secure some items, but that was it.

Once I was done, I posted photos and people were kind and said they liked it! But it is not perfect. And that is okay. Gathering together with friends, making something crafty, isn’t always about being obsessed with decorating your home for the holidays. It is sometimes used to heal the soul, to heal what may be off for your holiday season. I know that sometimes, in my workshops, I would sense someone that may not have been totally festive – something was off, maybe they were sad, maybe they were lonely but when we all got together to craft together, it tends to make you focus on something else and it is art therapy! It allows your mind to be distracted, to focus on something other than disturbing or upsetting thoughts. It can help you. It is art therapy, and I hope you get some of your own therapy time in too if you need some!

P.S. Someone asked me if I put the white touches (frosted look) on the pinecones myself, which I did not, but you can do that – just grab a sponge, put some white paint on it, and roll the pinecone across it and let it dry.

Love, Cathy T
ContainerCrazyCT.com
Located in East Windsor, CT
Currently retired

Date of Today’s Post: 12/3/24, Tuesday