Today we decided to decorate some eggs. A year or two ago, I bought a complete pysanky kit (dyes, waxes, kistkas and all the paraphernalia) at the Craft Council Seconds Sale, thinking it would be a fun activity for me and Katherine sometime.

Boy was it ever!

We blew the eggs first, which is atypical. I like to use the contents and am leery of the effect that acid dyes could have on them. So we blew them, rinsed them and gummed up the resultant holes with gobs of melted wax. It worked great. After we wiped all the wax off, I set them to drain thoroughly and it seems to be working fine.

We worked with fifteen colours, which I thought would be overkill but turned out to be just fine. The kids had a blast and I discovered that I enjoy the process of designing, dunking, drying, layering, dunking, drying, layering more, dunking, et cetera. It’s fascinating to see the layers building up and the final reveal is just plain cool.

I did a little reading (but not too much) about the basics on this page and this page. While I love and admire the traditional Ukrainian designs, I really haven’t any Ukrainian in me at all. I was mostly interested in the techniques (basically batiking on eggs) and what I might do with them.

My first egg came out quite nicely and I learned a bunch while doing it. I did another, but the lighting for photography isn’t great now and I would rather wait and fiddle with the technique more before showing. It’s relaxing, though. I think I’ll do a few more over the coming weeks. I have another dozen eggs in the fridge that need using!

Katherine thoroughly enjoyed it, too. One of her eggs got crunched in the making and Tamar (my sister) gave Katherine her half-done egg, which Katherine remarked afterwards was, “awfully nice of her and she didn’t have to do that but it really made me feel good.”

Can’t wait to have this project off my back (tomorrow!) so that I can play with such things in earnest again. I have a stack of fibre that wants spinning, a carder to finish reviewing, a set of sketches that are begging to be turned into quilted wallhangings and a number of ideas that require shuffling, sketching, rumination and action. All I need is time…..