Roughly a year ago Laura and I got to visit the Pysanky Museum in Kolomyia, Ukraine and it was my second favorite museum from our travels in Ukraine behind the Cosmonaut Museum. And so yesterday Laura and I had the opportunity to learn how to make pysanky at KU.
The first step was to draw on your design onto the egg. We were told that when designing the egg it's best to use raw eggs and then after it is complete you can remove the yolk. When drawing on your design try to do it as lightly as possible.
We picked the design in the right corner for our egg. It's a pretty basic with lots of straight lines.
Our egg with the design added.
Then using a tool called a kitska you put melted beeswax on the areas you would like to keep white.
If you know Laura then you can guess which color we dyed the egg.
As you can see the beeswax stops the dye from reaching the egg shell.
Here is the dried egg after dying. If you are going to use multiple colors it's important to go from light to dark on the color spectrum.
When you are done dying you can melt the beeswax off the white areas.
Here are some of the completed eggs done by our pysanky guru Megan. Maybe with a little practice we can someday make eggs as half as good as this. If you are interested in doing some pysanky yourself you can find all the tools you'll need HERE.
