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?
love the eggs! Next year we will use the cricut to decorate Easter eggs! Thanks for the idea!
Great idea! I am already looking forward to it 🙂