Martha Stewart, This Wasn't Fair.

When I saw the below cover of Martha Stewart Living, it was love at first sight. I have to make those eggs, I thought.

So, I read through the instructions, I disregarded the part about blowing the innards out and opted for hard-boiling, all 18 of them, (despite my dislike of buying tools) I bought Martha Stewart brand decoupage glue, I had friends over to help me hand-cut those ridiculously tricky little paper silhouettes from Martha's template online because I wasn't going to buy the bunny and egg Martha Stewart craft punches, which retail for 10 dollars each. And well, here are the results. First, of course, Martha's version:

And, ugh, mine:

So maybe things started to go wrong in the dyeing stage. I used the Paas kit because I grew up with Paas and I like using those little tablets and the wire egg-dropper even though it doesn't really work. But I couldn't get the colors deep enough or even close to Martha's colors, especially that pea green color. How did you get that color, craft editors at Martha Stewart? (Honestly, I think they spray-painted them.)

Things got much worse at the decoupage stage even though they started out looking only mildly unsuccessful.

But see in the background the M.S. template I printed out? The silhouettes are light blue. Well, the directions say to transfer those images to a different sheet of paper, but it didn't say that if you cut them straight from the template, that your eggs will end up looking like total failures...

I wanted the white side of the paper to show, but the glue was causing the blue color to creep in. Eventually, we learned that the blue side needed to be face up if they were going to look like anything resembling Easter in the slightest.

The prettiest thing to come out of all of this was the paper towel we used to soak up excess dye:

I think I'm going to need some time to heal before I attempt another Martha craft, but I think everyone at the Pesach/Easter party appreciated (or appreciated making fun of) my efforts.