Category: Pysanky eggs

This is out of the basement — ha ha a pysanky egg made by one of my kids or myself (probably me). It is up for sale but is cracked…just a little, thus is being sold just for the cost of shipping.

Ostrich egg dyed with pysanky dyes, in a musical theme and coated with urethane.

I am posting the image so that you all know that urethane is not a good covering for such projects.  After about 20 years this looks horrible, and the ambering of the whole egg is just sad.  So be aware of what products you use to coat your projects.  Also, I am not proud of the design… ha ha.   Lessons learned.

This was a lark….. not sure about whom would like it, but it was fun to do, and the orange of this egg is intense, would that the black had dyed as intensely. Its a face, none that I remember seeing before..LOL.

I liked the way this particular egg took the dyes. The colors are more subtle and there are not that many hot spots from the commercial egg washing machine. I have not gotten into the habit of ordering eggs “unwashed” for pysanky, just use what comes from the local grocery store. I will say over the last 20 years egg washing has improved, i would sometimes find an egg in a carton that was scarred badly by going round and round in the rollers or whatever they use… completely unusable for pysanky.

Black dots on this egg are pretty hard to see, but I am posting it anyway.  One learns a lot from enlarging photographs… sadly in this case I learned that my kistka was probably neither hot enough or clogged with ash, as the lines are kind of scratchy and dont look like they flowed nicely.

We learn from our mistakes.  Unfortunately these mistakes were made about 20 years ago… ha ha…

Not a great picture, but still one of those moments in time that I treasure, wiping the wax off a pysanka egg after its done….. thinking, will this turn out well, how badly did some areas of the egg take the die, did I plan colors correctly.  Ha ha… almost like getting a surprise gift at the end of the project.  You can see closely on this egg that I didn’t watch the amount of wax from my kistka in the white dots, as the black dye found its way into the center of the white dots.

This pysanka egg might have been improved with a little detail in the flower, but the background is kind of fun. Somehow I am always mentally thinking about how little time there is to do so many fun art-projects (and science as well, since that is my profession). I don’t know whether going through life “hoping to find something interesting” or “finding so many things interesting” is the worse curse/blessing. The burden lies in practice, getting better, and that takes time time time.

I enjoyed doing this craft for many years, but moved to mosaic and also to polymer clay. I still have some of the dyes and am waiting for inspiration on how to combine all three types of egg decorating into a single egg. Well, maybe also add a little etching and carving. But these were fairly traditional pysanky.

While they are not particularly inspired, some of the chicken eggs (just from the local grocery) dyed pretty well. My guess is that currently the eggs are so treated, washed and bleached that they would be scarred and non-receptive to the dyes.

This is kind of non-traditional pysanka, daisies and dots on a chicken egg.  It is from the mid 1990s I believe, when all my kids were doing pysanky with me, weeks on end in the spring. As I look at this it looks more like one my daughter would do than one I would do, I will ask her.