I have a major problem - i cannot remember how to texture properly at all.

I've finished my scene and added absolutely loads of detail and obis i'm running out of time but for the past 5 hours i've been sitting here trying to figure it out and i'm losing it a little with my patience. I've gone over matt's texture tree videos countless amounts of times, i've looked in the computer animation book, i've gone over what annabeth showed me the other day and i don't understand what I'm doing wrong. It just is not working and i can't figure out what i'm missing which is wasting time, so i'm just gonna have to come back to this tomorrow or try and do it all thursday asking peoples help but that would be cutting it very fine. I took some screen shots of the uv mapping I've been trying to do -
I'm following it all step by step :S

so where have i gone wrong?

- I made sure the size was correct,

i made sure the little star was deleted,

i tried saving it as a targa and a jepeg

 i inverted the colours and copied the background and deleted the original background

 i spread my colour over the net perfectly and again tried saving it as a targa and a jepeg just to make sure

 I then opened up hyper shade and created a new lambert, selected file then selected the correct one that i'd saved. When it opened i right click and made sure that i had the object selected then click assign material to selection. For some reason it just didn't work, i tried pressing 6 to show up the shader and still nothing :S 

 I tried it again with the textures that i got from my camera and still the same thing