TRIPPIN' CHICKEN

Eggs - Pyzanky

I met with Mistress Diane de Winchester in October of 2005 for a two-day session on making pysanky eggs. Pysanky is the Ukrainian technique of making dyed eggs with wax resist. The wax is drawn onto the egg shell using a tool called a kistka, which in its earliest days consisted of a small copper funnel held into a hole on a wooden handle using copper wire wrapped around the junction. The wax was dropped one bit at a time into the funnel, heated over a candle, and drawn onto the surface of the egg. It has now evolved into an electric device slightly resembling its predecessor, but which gives much more control over the line drawn and lays out a finer layer of wax. The egg is dunked into dye baths one color at a time from lightest shade to darkest, and each line that is drawn on will come out being the color you want that part to be.  So you start drawing over the spots you want to stay white, dunk the egg in the yellow bath, draw over the parts to stay yellow, and so on down to black.  Once done, the wax is melted and wiped off over a candle, then the egg is blown out through a small hole over which a decorative metal piece can be placed to hide the hole.

The technique is dated by lore and symbolism back to pre-Christian times in the Ukraine (pre-700 CE). Very little physical evidence exists for this, however, due to the extremely fragile nature of the art. There is plenty of symbolism and tradition surrounding the technique, which include symbols of nature and the harvest, and tales of the eggs being used in courtship among young adults. The technique is very beautiful and requires a great amount of control. It also carries a great deal of danger; the slightest wobble can throw off a design, a dropped egg can ruin hours of work, and there’s always the chance that the egg is too porous and will sweat during the wax melting, thus ruining the entire work. However, I must say that this is one of the coolest things that I have ever learned how to do, and I hope to continue to practice and get better over time.

This second egg was my attempt at a black-background egg, which is very traditional Ukrainian style. However, my egg turned out looking somewhat African, so I’m calling it the African Egg. In the order of the pictures best showing them, I included images of ferns, Mary’s tears, nets, and my heraldic bee (yeah, I know, it doesn’t look like a bee, but that’s what I aimed for). In the boxes around the bee, I included my SCA initials (AA) and the SCA year (40).

The third egg is my favorite, the blue and white egg.  Although multi-colored eggs are more traditional, I have to say I really like the way the dual-colored ones turned out.  I simply added as much decoration as I could all at once.  I especially like the way the ends of this egg turned out.  You can see that I still don’t have much control over the kistka, as my lines wobble a lot.  And to make things more difficult, when the wax in the kistka comes out clear, it’s very hard to see where you’re drawing!

This next egg was supposed to come out purple but actually turned out blue and white. I still like it – this was a major trial of my patience, as I had to draw each of those lines as parallel and steady as possible. I actually incorporated an embroidery technique to make this egg: I started with the center most line in each space, then worked my way out on each side. This is close to how satin stitch is done in order to maintain uniformity and coverage. Also, although they can barely be seen, some of the tiny squares inside the nets are of a lighter blue/purple than the rest. This is because Diane wanted me to try making spaces that had a lighter shade, which involved a quick dip in a dye bath, drying the egg, waxing over certain spots, then double dipping for a longer soak. One interesting piece of pysanky trivia: when you let an egg sit in a dye bath overnight, the dye will soak through the shell and dye the yolk its color. It makes for an amusing if not a little gross experience when it comes time to blow out the yolk (green eggs, baby!).

And now for the mess up eggs.  These two were dyed in a color, waxed over with a design, then dunked in bleach to get rid of the background color.  While the theory is good on paper, it’s a little more difficult to get right in the real world.  My first one came out grayish, so Diane used it to teach me how to scratch designs onto the dyed portion of the egg.

This last egg was the worst of the two, not for design but for how it came to be: it was going fine as a matching egg for the blue and white one earlier, when during the wax removal my egg started to sweat and the dye ran. I was bummed, but there was no way to tell before the work that this egg was particularly porous. So, having a lost egg on our hands, we used it for experimentation, and tried bleaching and then re-dying it. It didn’t take too well, but it was a good lesson learned. Thus it became The Egg That Wouldn’t Dye: