A couple of comments yesterday made me think that I have probably never explained the process of making a Ukrainian egg or “pysanky”.  I’ll try to keep it simple!

Larger eggs are easier, although I did a fun series of three teeny eggs a few years ago.  A rinse in white vinegar gets any residual grease off the egg.  You work with a whole egg, uncooked and not emptied.

Ukrainian egg dying is a little similar to batik.  You apply melted wax to the egg and then dip it in dye.  You repeat this, from your lightest color to you darkest until you’re done and then melt all the wax off.  A very traditional pysanky will be white, yellow, orange, green, red and black but there are plenty of other designs using other shades (blue, purple, pumpkin, brown, etc.)  After you are all done with waxing and dyeing, you melt all the wax off the egg (carefully) to reveal your design in all its glory.

There are a few tools for making pysanky.  The most critical is called a kistka and it is the tool that you use to melt the beeswax and to apply the wax to the egg.  I have two kinds of kistkas.  The traditional kistka which is held over a candle to melt the wax and an electric kistka, which keeps the wax cone hot without having to use a candle.  Both traditional and electric have a variety of widths, depending on how thick or fine you want your wax lines.  I tend to use both during a project.  The beeswax has a black additive these days; without it, the wax is hard to see on the egg if you’re using electric – no carbon from a candle flame!

After you’ve melted off the wax, that’s when you add the varnish.  This is an important step because it not only makes the egg shiny and pretty but it adds a bit of strength to the shell.  If you are making pysanky that are being displayed but are not ornaments, then you are done.  Eventually the insides of a Ukrainian egg will dry up and you can hear the dried yolk rattle if you shake them.  (If you break one before it’s all dried up – get a clothespin for you nose!)  If you are making ornaments, you’ll need to blow them out and add a finding to the top so you can thread it with twine, floss or some sort of string. 

The most frequent question I get is how long an egg takes and it depends entirely on the complexity of your design.  This year’s egg, if I did one at a time, from beginning to end would take about 75 minutes, but since I’m doing several at one time, that cuts down the time to about 55 minutes each. 

Of course, there is plenty more I could say, but I’ll save that for when you ask me!

Tell me about any tools you need for your hobby!

The egg table is up.  And it only took two hours to completely torpedo this year’s design.

Many years ago I started coordinating my holiday crafts to a central theme.  In addition to the Ukrainian egg ornaments, I also make the cards as well as kid ornaments and 6×6 decorated calendars.  I try to tie all these items together every year.  One year I did a snowglobe theme, one year the theme was “branches”.  Peppermint, polar bear, gingerbread men, birds have all been done.  There are a few themes that get repeated – holiday trees is one of those and also poinsettias. 

This year’s theme is Santa.  The card, the kid ornament and the calendar were seriously  easy but the egg has been difficult.  First off, there just weren’t many idea out there to start with and most that I found were painting on eggs, not traditional wax/resist.  I had one idea and then when I sketched it out the first time, I realized it would be too hard to get all Santa’s proportions correct on an egg.  Then I turned to clipart – a surprisingly good way to generate ideas for Ukrainian egg design.  I messed with the idea for a couple of weeks and thought I had a good  design.

Suffice it to say that drawing curvy lines in hot wax on an egg isn’t an easy thing to do.  Then add fiddling around with mixing different dyes to get Santa’s skin right.  Leaving space for his eyes was a pain.  But the biggest issue was just too much white and a bit of red then a black background; it was just — blah.  And I didn’t like the side border either, although that could have been remedied.  I completed two of the design and then abandoned it.

I spent about an hour going through my egg design books and a couple of online places and finally found something that I could alter.  There is no actual Santa on the egg, but it has a lot of red and white, with a black background and I was able to add “ho, ho, ho”; that’s as close as we’re going to get.  This design is more complicated than the failed Santa image, but much more satisfying.  I managed to get three done before I just couldn’t sit on my hard chair any longer – the design is solidified so now I’ll be on a roll starting this morning – after I feed the bad Santas into the garbage disposal!

Have you ever had to abandon what you had initially thought was a good idea?