First of the Year

Over the weekend I pulled out all my pysanky stuff and actually did an egg (and started on another, but gave up in puzzlement when a fifteen-minute dye bath failed to produce a good color with the yellow¹).  I tried a new thing, filling the blown shells with sand--suitable for use in a small child's sandbox--so that I can have my shells and eat the eggs too.  Pysanky dyes are toxic, so you can't eat the egg after dyeing, but trying to dye blown shells is a pain in the neck because you have to hold them under, which is tedious and prevents working on two at a time.  Soution: blow, then fill with sand and plug the hole.  It works nicely, as witness my results².

Once I'm done going through all the shells I blew out last year and never got around to using, I'm going to start on the organic eggs, which have much stronger shells.  It might have an effect on the way the dye takes up.

Anyway, this particular pattern, which I'm calling the Delft egg for fairy obvious reasons, is from a book of designs by...I can't remember her name, but if you see pysanky supplies in the US, it's probably her.  That box set with the mostly black cover?  That lady.  Anyway, you can't see it well because my picture quality sucks, but there are actually three shades of blue happening. 

1: It's possible my dyes are finally getting exhausted. 

2: These pictures are not great, but I did a little playing around in Flickr's built-in editor so you can at least get the idea. 

links: digg this    del.icio.us    technorati    reddit