Little Grow Peep

When I saw this adorable craft in the latest issue of Woman's Day I knew it would be at the top of our "To Do" list.

How could we not love it??? It had painting, gluing, messy grass and Peeps! Really Peeps! Those squishy, sugary, marshmallowly Peeps that come around every Easter.


Here is what you need to make 3 flowers (everything but the Peeps was purchased at Jo-ann's):

• 4 packages of 5-count yellow chick Peep marshmallow (4 will give you extra incase you have a gap AND give the kids some to snack on while being crafty)
• Decorative grass
• Three 6" embroidery hoops (I couldn't find 3 of the same kind so I used two wooden and painted them yellow and one yellow plastic, both worked equally well)
• Green flower foam
• Mini hot-glue gun and glue sticks (I would discourage using the larger hot-glue guns b/c they will just melt the Peeps instead of gluing them)
• Wooden dowels
• Paint 
• Mini flower pots. (I used terra cotta pots so that we could paint them the colors we wanted. You could easily use Easter-colored metal ones that are fairly easy to find this time of year)

First we painted our dowels green and our wooden hoops yellow.

We each picked out colors for the pots and I painted them with three coats of paint. Once dry, you need to glue the dowels to the hoops. This was the tricky part. For the wooden ones I removed the screws and hot glued the dowel in between the metal clasps.

The pins in the plastic hoop did not come out all the way so I glued the top of the dowel to the screw at the opening of the hoop. Don't worry if you use lots of glue, it will all be hidden by the Peeps. I was really surprised by how stable they were. Just use LOTS of glue.

While the hoops are drying you can put the green flower foam in each pot.

Now it's time to glue the Peeps to the hoops. Remove the Peeps from the package but do not separate them. Apply a thick line of glue to 1/3 of the front of the embroidery hoop. Gently press one group of five Peeps onto the glue with their beaks facing the center of the hoop, slightly bending them to cover the ring. Repeat with other two groups. Use your extra Peeps to fill in any gaps that you may have.

*Make sure to center the Peeps on the hoops so they don't flop around. My first hoop looked like this:

See how they are glued to close too the edge? I needed to pull them off and make them look more like this:

See the difference? This hoop was much more stable.

Finish gluing the Peeps to the remaining hoops.

Once all the glue is dry it is time to put the flowers together. First gently poke the sticking into the green flower foam. We wanted our flowers to be different heights so we varied how far we poked them down.

Next I removed the sticks so that I could put hot-glue down each hole. We also tucked grass around the sides of the green flower foam.

Put the sticks back in the hole and then put more hot glue on the top of the flower foam and place grass on top. You can spray the peeps lightly with a craft sealer to preserve them.

Display your beautiful garden for all to see!