Beautiful Easter eggs-simple and easy!

 

Flush off of my first crafty victory in a long time, this weekend I decided to temp fate and see if I might be able to have another success.  It all started with Martha.  Stewart Living, that is. I received her latest issue a couple of weeks ago, which featured an article about decorating easter eggs- but of course, not the way that I do them, with the drugstore box of egg dye bought the day before Easter.  No, these are hand painted and decoupaged and I-don’t-know-what-all.  At the same time, Good Housekeeping comes along with some beautiful marbelized and glittery eggs on the cover.  Here’s what I’m talking about:

For some reason, I just couldn’t stop thinking about those eggs.  I really wanted to give them a try.  And, Beau loves projects like this, so I knew he would be into it.  (Which he was, for about 3 minutes until a friend called him to come over).

So, I took these projects straight from these magazines.  Living has all of the projects, with video tutorials, here.  Good Housekeeping has them here. Their tutorials are much better than what I can give you- but I’ll tell you what did and didn’t work for me.

My favorite was hand painting the eggs! I am not an artist, so I thought this part was going to not go well- but surprisingly, it was very easy and fun!  They dried super quick, so they were really easier and less messy to work with than egg dye.  And although I didn’t come close to the cover picture, I’m still pleased with how they turned out:

Living had a tutorial in which they cut up doilies and decoupaged them to the eggs.  Well, I didn’t happen to have any unused doilies lying around, so I just ripped up some paper towels and Mod Podged them to the eggs.  The effect?

Kind of looks like an egg is dressing up like a mummy for Halloween, doesn’t it?  Maybe if you had a whole bowl of them, styled up better, it would be a nice effect.  Oh wait, yes it is:

 

Living also had a project with men’s cut up dress shirts decoupaged to the eggs.  Didn’t have any of those either (who are these people?) but I attempted to recreate this with a gingham ribbon.  Not good.  Just not good.  This was the only part of the project that frustrated me, because I couldn’t get the ribbon to lie down- it just looked like the  poor egg was spouting some growths.  Or limbs.  I realized later that I didn’t get a pic of this.  If you want to create this project, just go to the thrift store and buy a gingham shirt, which is what I should have done in the first place.

The glitter was super fun to work with!  Just Mod Podge, apply glitter, and you have a beautiful egg with hardly any effort:

Oooh, I almost forgot!  That gold spotted egg I made with a gold paint pen from Michael’s.  Super cute.

Okay, the marbleized eggs from Good Housekeeping.  Those aren’t the shaving cream method, but done by putting a couple of drops of fingernail polish into a bowl of lukewarm water, then swirling the egg around in the water.  The directions say warm water- but when I used warm water, this is what happened:

The color clumped together and the eggs wouldn’t color.  So I figured out to use just very lukewarm water and it worked a lot better…although I was never able to get the really cool marbled look that GH had:

Here’s what I ended up with:

I was really surprised at how easy, fun, and relaxing this was!  A huge bonus- it was much less messy than regular Easter egg dye!

So now I’m two for two.  Maybe this blog thing is bringing out my deeply buried crafty genes.  Dare I even put a “Projects” category in my menu?