DYEING BROWN EGGS

Has anyone else noted problems with waxing on brown eggs? I noticed that the wax sticks well to the bare shell, but if I dye and try to make a three-color egg, I get loss. The wax comes off of new lines, but not from areas I've colored in between old lines.

It happened with this egg:


(This is a light brown egg; the color balance in this photo does not show this well.)

Note the loss of red in the sinuous line that surrounds the central motif.

Initially I thought it was just an isolated problem, due to a bad egg, but then I noticed it on a few more of my pysanky. And when I took a closer look at the photo I had copied this pattern from, I noted the same sort of defect - loss of the curved red lines.

Any ideas?

I've since avoided the problem by only using the second color (after the brown base) as either the final color, or to fill in areas already outlined, as in this pysanka:

ODD EGGS

I found these interesting, but odd eggs at one of the museums in Trypillia. Initially I merely found them oddly attractive, but it wasn't until a bit later that I began to wonder how they were made.

Most Ukrainian pysanky are made with a simple wax-resist technique. Eggs are place through a series of dye-baths, from light to dark, and areas waxed in to preserve the underlying color. In some parts of Ukraine, bleaching is done; once all the colors have been used, the egg is bleached to a final white color.

That's about as fancy as most traditional Ukrainian pysanky get.

Here in the diaspora we have gotten more creative. Light blue, a color rarely seen on Ukraine pysanky, is often used, and eggs are processed with an orange rinse, or colors removed with various cleaning agents, to allow a greater palette of colors. Bleaching is more common, as is etching. All sorts of modern tricks and techniques are used to make ever fancier pysanky.

So what is so unusual about these simple pysanky?

Simply that there are black accents on the eggs.

Black is normally the final color when it is used, but here it is merely an accent--a few dots here, a line there, a few diamonds filled in elsewhere.

How was this done?

One way would require a lot of work, more than is normally seen with traditional pysanky. It would require coloring in, with wax, of all the colored areas, leaving only those few spots that should be black uncovered.

I doubt that this pysankarka did that.

I think that a bicolored egg was created (white designs on a colored background), and then the black designs added with a brush before the wax was removed. It is a simple and clever trick, but one that I haven't seen before in traditional pysanka making.

Any other theories out there?

ALL THAT IS OLD IS NEW AGAIN....

I had a chance to visit the Ethnographic Museum in L'viv again this past August. It has lovely displays of Western Ukrainian costumes, tools, ceramics, embroidery and other folk art objects, as well as tools, a few traditional home interiors, and a large collection of antique European clocks. The last collection, incongruous though it may be, is actually quite interesting, with clocks dating back to the 16th century.

But I digress.

The pysanky that captured my interest were not those in the display cases (although they were interesting as well, and I photographed them all), but in the gift shop. There I found these:

(Click on the photo for a larger view)

The patterns seemed traditional enough, but it was the addition of etching that I found interesting. Etching eggs is not really a traditional Ukrainian style of egg decoration. We paint eggs, dye them, glue things to them, scratch them with sharp objects, and write on them with wax, but we don't etch or cut them.

These then are a modern interpretation of ancient designs.

Birds and deer, spirals and God's eyes, sun signs and evergreens are all present. The designs are much as my ancestors might have made them. But the technique has evolved.

Pysanka making, or pysankarstvo, the ancient art that was almost completely eradicated by the Russian Soviet state, has returned, and is growing and flourishing in Ukraine. And it's a very good thing.

STARTING OVER

I started this blog a long time ago in a fit of energy. And then I never did anything with it.

It's time to change that. I've been posting to the Eggs Pysanky Yahoo group, and putting pysanka-related posts on my regular blog for a while now. Now I will try and put all that here instead.

The picture at the top of this post is that of a bowl of pysanky from a museum in Tripillya, Ukraine. They are traditional eggs from the Kyiv region.