At 18 months old, I’m fully aware that my son doesn’t yet grasp the “reason for the Easter season.”  But I figured that he’s old enough to have a great time picking up plastic eggs and jamming them into a basket or bag of some sort.  I’m trying hard to reduce the amount of clutter in my home overall, and make things easier to organize and keep tidy.  For that reason, I knew that a regular store-bought Easter basket just wasn’t gonna cut it.  They’re WAY too hard to store without causing some sort of damage.

I searched everywhere for patterns, but didn’t find anything I liked until I stumbled upon this tutorial from Reuse, Recycle, Resweater.  How cute is that???  It looked simple enough, so I headed to Goodwill to see if I could find any sweaters.  I was very disappointed in their selection… guess I’ll have to wait a few more months till people have donated their winter wear.  I ended up bringing home three very different sweaters, but apparently didn’t pay too much attention to “the rules.”  I should have bought a children’s sized wool sweater.  I had one wool sweater and one children’s sweater… but it wasn’t the same one  🙂

I tried my luck with the (cotton) children’s sweater, and it just stretched itself into oblivion on the first seam.  So I abandoned all the cotton ones and went for the wool cardigan.  I almost felt guilty cutting it up.  It probably belonged to some sweet old lady who sat in a rocker with a vintage hand-sewn quilt over her lap.  But the guilt didn’t last that long, and my scissors and I made quick work of cutting off the bottom of the sweater.  It didn’t take long for me to determine that I wouldn’t be able to use this particular sweater the way the afore-mentioned tutorial directed me to.  From then on, I was on my own.

With some brightly colored buttons from my stash, some leftover denim from my hamper re-do, and some red bias tape, I turned this:

into THIS:

It’s slouchy, and soft so it’s easy to store without the fear of permanently damaging it.  There’s plenty of room for LOTS of eggs… especially if he shoves a couple extras in these handy pockets.

I’ll have to update this photo with one of Ryder actually hunting eggs, but in the meantime, it’s a hit!  Luckily for me, you can’t inspect it too closely from your computer, so you won’t know how imperfect it is.  But it’s certainly made with love.

I’ll be keeping my eye out for the perfect sweater, and maybe someday I’ll successfully create the basket I set out to make in the first place  🙂