Happy Easter

I recently started a job and have been very busy finishing my senior year of high school in addition to working on Shoppe orders, so blog posts are going to be sporadic until the end of May. Today I went to put together a post and discovered that this one-- which was supposed to go up EASTER MONDAY-- didn't actually publish and instead saved as a draft. I don't EVEN know how I overlooked that. Oh, well. Happy late Easter Monday. Here's some eggs to look at.

Happy Easter, everyone!

Do you remember the Sharpie Easter Eggs I made last year? I'd experimented with Sharpies to try to copy the traditional Ukrainian eggs but discovered that it was really hard to do. Sharpies are great for drawing on eggs, but the neat geometric patterns are difficult to copy without using the beeswax and dye technique.

And guess what??? My parents bought us a pysanky set this year! Here's a collection of (most of) the eggs I've decorated in the past couple of weeks. The pictures are blurry because I didn't grab a tripod-- I was in a rush to take pictures before putting the eggs into little boxes to give to friends and family!

We got a neat egg-blowing tool which only makes one hole and does not require killing your cheeks and lungs in order to squirt the insides out. It's a nice little pump that creates a vaccum and will both empty and clean an egg in about two minutes.

Ukrainian eggs are a lot more complicated and time-instensive than I had anticipated! (Which of course just means that I am more obsessed with it than I would have been, because it's a nice challenge.) We boiled dyes and put them into mason jars. You take a cleaned egg, write on it with melted beeswax using a kitska wherever you want white, dye it in yellow, write with beeswax, dye it in the next darkest color, etc.

Our favorite part? When the egg is completely decorated and covered with blackened beeswax, you hold it over a flame until all the wax melts. You get to play with fire, guys. This is the coolest thing since the invention of fire. If you aren't careful, you can even heat the egg up so much that it hurts your fingers and you drop it!

click to enlarge

The kit arrived the same day that Pope Francis was elected! This was my second-ever egg made using this technique. The front has a slightly messy version of the papal seal, the back has a cross, and the sides say "Habemus Papam - Francis - Allelulia."

(My first egg was awful and not worth photographing).

This one was actually a lot cooler in real life. I soaked the egg in vinegar for a few minutes after making it a deep blue, and the top layer of dye (or of the egg itself, I'm not sure) rubbed right off with a paper towel. It made a messy, faded look. I've heard you can also dye eggs in bleach to go back to white-- this is how you get white backgrounds. It would be sooo much easier than trying to cover large swatches with wax.

Ta-da! Ukrainian eggs are so much fun, but as you can see I both have little time and little patience, so I gravitated towards making lots of simpler designs. I'm in complete awe of true pysanky eggs!

Oh, and I didn't spend all my egg decorating time using dyes. There aren't any cool religious icon eggs this year, but I did make this:

Frodo Baggins LOTR sharpie easter egg