DIY Snack Pack Easter Basket

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I love Easter a lot, and I honestly do not know why I do not take more time to celebrate the holiday through my special holiday food and DIY projects. My family and I celebrate Easter every year, but I never make anything special other than cooking a nice dinner. If I had to say why, I would probably say it's because this time of year feels hectic, so I am always limited on time right when Easter rolls around. 

I took it upon myself this year to find a DIY project that I could work on for a few weeks sporadically, but could also be done in one sitting if I had the time. I thought it would be fun to create an Easter basket around a Super Snack Pack Pudding Cup! 

Check out our tutorial on how to make your very own basket below:

 So first, you will want some pipe cleaners. I had about 50 on stock of each color, so if you have that you are more than fine. Since it's Easter, I wanted to pick fun Spring colors to make my basket out of and why I chose theses fun blue, yellow, and pink shades.

When you are planning on how many pipe cleaners you will need, here is my advice: the number is not going to be the same if you use a different package than I do. Rather than a number in mind, you will want to lay out pipe cleaners in a line side-by-side (like shown below), and then actually place your pudding cup on top of the pile to see if it is wider than the cup or not. The goal is to have the pipe cleaner 2 times the width of a pudding cup, since we will be folding the woven pipe cleaners all the way around the cup (and don't worry, you will see just what I mean as you read on).

So these weaving patterns works for 3 colors. For the sake of explaining, I will just refer to each type of weave as the color pipe cleaner. 

First, you will want to lay your yellows vertically and not have them too spread apart (but still close together). Then, you will take your blue pipe cleaner; start at the left side of the line of yellows, and as you weave you will work your way from left to right. First you will want to go under, and then over, and then under, and then over. Repeat until the yellows run out.

Now, grab your pink pipe cleaner and we are going to do the same process except have the over/under process reversed; instead of going under first, you will go over the yellow pipe cleaner. The process will repeat itself over and over until you have covered majority of the yellow pipe cleaners. 

Here is a sample of what your completed weave may look like. As you see, the more pipe cleaners that you add, the more effect that the weaving pattern is shown. 

The great thing about this DIY project is: if you mess up half way through, you can start over without having to really start over. On more than one occasion, I found myself messing up the over/under pattern, so I just removed the one pipe cleaner and fixed it. Ta-da!

As you work on your woven pipe cleaners, place your pudding cup in the center and fold the pipe cleaners up and around the pudding up. The reason you want to do this is because it will show you if you need to add in another row or not. 

Now, once you are pleased with your woven pattern, wrap it around the pudding cup and hold it in place. This will help the basket keep its shape until we hot glue gun a white pipe cleaner around the top to keep its shape. Also, using scissors, trim the excess (non-woven) pipe cleaners.

When you are done with that, grab a white pipe cleaner and glue it to the tops of your basket going around in a circle. This will not only help keep the shape of your basket, but it will also make it more aesthetically pleasing. Also, to give it that Easter basket look we all know and love, you will want to use another pipe cleaner to make a handle hoop from one side of the basket to the other (I used gold).

Now, the awesome thing about Super Snack Pack Pudding Cups is that they are so versatile and fun to add mixins to! If I want to whip up something fun, I head down to Walmart to buy some Snack Packs. 

If you are thinking of coming up with your own Snack Pack Easter project, there is actually a $0.50 off coupon at Walmart you can use.

I wanted to do some shaved coconut in green food coloring (to give it the look of grass on top of the pudding), so I grabbed 1/4 cup of shaved coconut and 1/2 teaspoon of green food coloring. Also, I wanted to grab a marshmallow and rub it with silver food coloring (to make it look like a boulder sitting in the grass to give it that Spring feeling). 

And here's the finished look! If I had to do it again, I may have tried a different ratio of food coloring on the boulder (since it looks a lot more metallic than I had thought). What I had done to get this look was used 1 drop of metallic silver on a regular sized marshmallow; if I wanted to do it again (or, if you will try our project) I would instead rub the marshmallow with the food coloring cap remnants, rather than actually placing a drop of food coloring on top and massaging it into the marshmallow.

I think that this little pudding cup Easter basket is just darling! I love how the basket turned out!

What will you mix into your Snack Pack Pudding Cups?