Pysanka

Flurries

2010-01-02T18:48:00.000-05:00

Last summer I found a local source of fresh goose eggs, and not the kind that are only slightly bigger than chicken eggs. These are the really big goose eggs, with a volume of three really large chicken eggs.

I've been trying to use them up. I haven't worked with goose eggs since, I think, the 1980s, so it's taken a bit of getting used to. I've made a variety of eggs for various holidays, including a goose eggs pysanka for my father's birthday, and a frog-themed egg for my sister-in-law's.

For the winter holidays I decided to place snowflakes–as many as would fit–onto these eggs, and see how they would turn out. I drew various sized circles (in pencil) on the eggs, and then drew dividing lines (for six-fold symmetry). I then doodled in, with wax, all sorts of snowflakes. It was hard not to repeat myself, and to keep adjoining ones dissimilar, but I succeeded. I ended up crating three, the first (and the prototype with all the mistakes) for me, and the other two as gifts. This is what they looked like:

You can see more views of these eggs here. To learn how to make snowflake eggs, go here.

Copper Country Pysanky

2007-05-24T15:57:00.001-04:00

I made pysanky with friends on my recent trip to Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Above is a photo of some of them–the big egg is a normal sized chicken egg, and the smaller ones are cockateil eggs.

SNOWFLAKE PYSANKY

2006-12-28T01:41:00.001-05:00

Last year, in late November, I found I had a lot of small eggs left over from pysanka making. Casting about for something to do with them, I came upon the idea of making snowflake pysanky. I'd seen them before on other sites, so decided to try my hand at them.

Using the UGS templates to create six even division, I began drawing--with wax. I found the best way to make the pysanky was just to doodle. I'd played with compasses as a child, and this was similar.

The snowflakes came out quite nice. I attached small findings to them, and then gave them away to friends and family. This year created a whole bunch more.

Like real snowflakes, no two are exactly alike.

You can view my snowflake galleries here.

PYSANKA 9-1-1

2006-12-01T11:23:00.000-05:00

Eggs break and crack......It’s an unhappy fact of life. You put hours of work into a pysanka only to discover, as you’re finishing, a crack. What to do?

I've had to deal with cracked and broken eggs both when making and when teaching pysanky. I've written about the approaches I use to "save" pysanky on my website here.

CHEMISTRY LESSON

2006-11-22T08:54:00.000-05:00

The discussion at my Yahoo group turend recently as to how aniline dyes actually work, and what the function of vinegar is. Having once been a sudent of chemistry (BA degree), I did a bit of research and reviewed my knowledge of acid-base and organic chemistry to write this treatise about the chemistry of dyeing.

Peruse it at your own risk!

SMALL EGGS

2006-11-17T07:19:00.000-05:00

A couple of years ago, just before Easter, I discovered small chicken eggs. I had gone to a shop that sells Amish poultry and eggs, and they were selling them by the dozen. I bought a couple dozen just to play around with, and really liked them.

I found that they were great for making traditional pysanky, like this one

and this one

from Volyn'. Traditional patterns are often fairly simple, and look too sparse on large or extra large chicken eggs.

I also discovered that, except for Easter, the shop didn't carry small eggs. I had to special order them by the case, with 15 dozen eggs to the case. So I had to find more uses for the small eggs.

I found that children like working with them, simply because they are smaller, and easier to decorate. I found that they make really cute Halloween jack-o-lanterns

and penguins.

Rockhopper penguin

And I found that they make lovely Christmas ornaments, when decorated with snowflakes and dyed in jewel or sky blue tones.

This week, as I was beginning to make my snowflake pysanky, I discovered that my Amish poultry place no longer sells small eggs. What to do? Settle for mediums from Kroger? No. Through the wonder of the internet, I was able to find another place locally that sells small eggs.

So I get to make my snowflake eggs after all.............

MORE BROWN EGGS

2006-11-17T06:52:00.000-05:00

I've posted more photos of my brown eggs at my website, here and here. I worked on them intermittently over the summer, and finally phtographed and posted them. They are almost all variations on three themes: 40 triangles,

barrel style (horizontal bands)

and 12 diamonds (I'm not sure what the actual name for this division is).

Have a look if you get a chance.

DYEING BROWN EGGS

2006-09-17T04:14:00.000-04:00

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

2006-09-01T18:28:00.000-04:00

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....

2006-09-01T18:07:00.000-04:00

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

2006-09-01T18:00:00.000-04:00

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.