No matter how you typically decorate Easter eggs, I think you’ll be touched by this beautiful story from Lucy Finney, one of our photo stylists and a model for Classic Sewing magazine. Her mother, Betty Carter, created quite the egg smocking legacy! Thank you, Lucy, for sharing this.
Happy Easter!
Love, Phyllis
“When my mother, Betty Carter, was young, each year she would sew coordinating outfits for my brother and me before Easter. These handmade items always had a smocking detail, and soon she began using leftover fabric to smock eggs each spring for our Easter baskets.
Some were made from kits that included a Styrofoam egg, pleated fabric, floss, and directions for several different smocking patterns. Her goal was to have enough smocked eggs to decorate a little tabletop tree in our home for the Easter season.
When that goal was achieved, she gathered small branches from our yard, placed them into a tub of Plaster of Paris, then spray-painted the arrangement a soft white.
She hung the eggs on the tree, put Easter grass around the base, scattered small figurines of bunnies in the grass, and then circled all of that with a little white picket fence. Over the years she displayed the little eggs in silver bowls, baskets, or scattered them around a centerpiece.
My mother says, ‘These smocked eggs are now treasures that remind me of those early years as a young mother of two precious children and how we prepared each spring for the celebration of our Lord’s resurrection. In addition to those memories, I now delight in seeing my granddaughter wear the many beautiful dresses that I created for her mother all those years ago.’”
-Lucy Finney
