Easter scene

I wanted to make an Easter scene with some typical Russian Easter food, which is saffron bread and spiced cottage cheese. These were easily made from air-drying clay. I painted the bread with watercolours, and I decorated the typical pyramid of cheese with black pepper that is supposed to be raisins. So far so good, but then I needed some painted eggs. My first idea was to take miniature eggs that I use to decorate the Easter tree:

You would think that they are small enough, but when I arranged them around the bread they looked enormous. Now, I know what while I can make bread and some other things from clay, I would never manage to make a credible egg, still less a dozen credible eggs of the same size. So I started looking around for something to recycle. In my Victorian kitchen, I have a basket of eggs which are codliver-oil pills (scroll to the bottom of the post for a close-up). Strangely, I have never since found pills in his shape, so I was a bit reluctant to take them, but the desire to have an Easter scene was strong.

I left the paints, brush and scissors in the picture for scale. Watercolours didn't stick on the coated pills so I used water-based acrylic and varnish. I also tried to paint some patterns with a gold pen, but it didn't look as good as I wanted it so I decided that simple was best. (Maybe next year I will make something more advanced).

Here I have set the table for Easter breakfast.

I decided to allow my English dolls to have a Russian Easter breakfast. So far they have only had English tea.