Sunday, September 17, 2006

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:

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I have and have not had this problem. After reading a lot of your info on brwon eggs, I decided to try a few things. I did an obscene amount of triangles, fine lines, and dots in two colors: brick and black. I do love how the brick looks on a brown egg. Anyway, I tried this on an egg that I did a vinegar rinse on and an egg I did not rinse. I only lost about 3 lines on both. I noticed the loss of wax when I pulled the spoon from the dye, as the wax was stuck to the spoon. Perhaps my problem is that I handled the egg to vigorously with the spoon? I'm going to try this again with a plastic spoon and see if that makes a difference. Like you, I had 0 problem with dyeing just one color.