Blow out egg-stravaganza

Lent continues, and so does Pysanka making! We have a stash of hollow eggs, but I recently got a dozen fresh duck eggs and a fresh goose egg, and we need to eat them before they go bad. Perfect opportunity to talk about blowing out eggs!

We have four different tools to use for a blow out. The goose neck thing on the far left I know nothing about. I think it can be used with the black globe on the far right? The yellow bellows is from Germany; it's called Blas-fix. We purchased it from the Ukrainian Gift Shop years ago. It came with a hand drill - you can see them in the box, they have green handles. Once upon a time we had two, but we learned that it doesn't hold up well in a high stress environment like a class. The black bulb is also from the Ukrainian Gift Shop. It's called Aunt Marge's Egg blower. I believe it is an in shop developed product, as its packaging matches some of the other things we have purchased that they themselves have put together. I did say we had four things for blowing out eggs; the last and probably least obvious from the picture is the time honored method of hand, mouth blown. 

My favorite tool of the lot is the yellow Blas-fix. It came with a nice little hand drill that makes even holes without cracks around them every time, and the Blas-fix does not create so much pressure inside the egg that it will pop apart. The tool also only requires you to drill one hole to blow out the egg, so there is no planning a design around two blow holes. If there is more than one person blowing out eggs and/or they feel like going the traditional route, the hand drill can obviously be used to drill uniform holes in both ends of an egg.

The traditional method of blowing eggs out requires that you poke two holes in either end of the egg [carefully] and then with gentle pressure, blow air through one of the holes, expelling the egg membrane through the other end.
With the Blas-fix, air is forced through the hole at the bottom of the egg through the bellows by the narrow straw; pressure in the egg forces the membrane out through the hole. Nice and neat. Unless you go crazy with either method and force too much air into the egg, in which case it will pop open.

Pysanky: prepping and making dye

It's Lent again! =D that means it's time to make pysanky! Or pysanke [I've seen it spelled that way, too], or in layman's English, Ukrainian Easter eggs. Whether or not it is Lent, any time is a good time to make a pysanke, it just happens to be one of my favorite things to do at this time of the year. There are a number of reasons why pysanke are made during the season of Lent, but I won't get into that. One of them was the availability of eggs.

I'm starting with white eggs this year; as you can see, some of these are already written on with wax.

At this point, some of the eggs are ready to take the first dye bath, but I don't have any fresh dye made. With this in mind, I thought I'd write up a quick semi-tutorial about setting up dyes using a premeasured dye package.

Materials:
packages of dye in desired color[s]. We order ours from The Ukrainian Gift Shop
glass jars and tight fitting lids - I use wide mouth Mason jars [more on this later]
scisors
a tablespoon measuring spoon
a quart size sauce pan, tea kettle or electric kettle for boiling water
a bottle of white vinegar 

a gallon of distilled* water

A tempered glass measuring cup such as Pyrex are very helpful but not necessary. We have a 16oz and 8 oz size; I used both of them.
A baking sheet or other tray such as melamine, that you are not fond of, with a lip is also helpful, but not necessary.
Nitrile gloves, or another exam style glove to keep your hands dye free, if you'd like. You could use dish washing gloves, but I find them cumbersome.
an apron to keep your clothes clean, or wear your painting clothes. This is dye, after all.

*Many dye companies, not just for dying eggs, reccomend using distilled water. What this means is that any particulates such as iron, lead or calcium have been processed out leaving pure water. Depending on the quality of the water in your area, using distilled water as a vehicle for you dye will yield the best end results. A gallon is typically the unit by which distilled water is sold.

Process:
Since I had saved last year's dye, the jars and lids needed to be cleaned. Best practice is beginning with clean, fresh materials. As I said, I use wide mouth Mason jars, specifically pint size. The wide mouth is easy to get an egg into and out of, especially if you find you have to fish one out with your fingers. The pint also holds the 10 oz of water needed to make the dye without spilling over when an egg is put in. I have not tried a goose egg in a pint size jar, but duck eggs still do not displace too much dye to spill over. When purchasing a 12 pack brand new, the cardboard box is an excellent  place to store the jars in. The plastic lids, whether they are Ball or aftermarket, hold fast. Permanent marker does not rub off of them. The plastic lids also do not corrode the way the metal gasket lids will [don't ask how I know...].  

I was planning on making at least four different colors to start, so I filled my sauce pan with the equivilent of two pints of water [I used a clean pint mason jar as my measure] and set the stove top to medium, so the water would heat while I set up my materials.

As the water is heating, clean and dry jars and lids. Set aside to dry 

Assemble other materials - tray, lids, jars, measuring cups, dye, scissors, tablespoon and white vinegar. Rather than try to pour out into the spoon, fill the smaller of the cups with white vinegar and dip out the spoon. It's much easier this way. Any left over can be poured back into the bottle. Set the vinegar with the measuring spoon aside for later.

I highly suggest either making your dye in a sink, or on the tray if you are a more confident DIYer, and remove any materials that could be stained. Your hands will probably be stained, unless you wear gloves. I personally don't care, and it won't harm you.

To keep myself straight, I presorted my dyes from lightest to darkest, and made sure each jar had a lid that was labled. Once they come out of the packet, the powder forms don't necessarily look like the color listed. Furthermore, once water is added and the color develops, it is easy to confuse some of the colors.  These dyes have an outer paper packet with instructions, and an inner foil packet of dye that must be cut open with scissors. It has been my experience that for best results, shaking the packet a bit forces the color powder to collect at one end, with less chance of powder ending up where it shouldn't be [for example, on you, or your clothes].

It is very important to follow the instructions on the packet!  

Ingredients go into the jar in this order:

1. color powder

2. boiling water

[3. vinegar]

The lightest color of dye available from the Ukrainian gift shop [and that I have on hand] is yellow, so my first jar got a packet of yellow color powder [I should note that it doesn't look yellow]. Next jar gold, light green, and turquoise.

 By this time, the water I put on the stove was just boiling. To keep the water from boiling off, I turned off the heat, but kept the sauce pan on the burner. Each jar [I double checked the instructions on each packet] gets 1 and 1/4 cups of boiling water, or 10floz. This is why the 16oz measuring cup is handy; it has a line for 10oz.

Each jar gets 1 and 1/4 cup [or 10 floz] of boiling water. I had enough water on hand to make one more jar of dye, so I grabbed a packet of pink. Dye powder first, then water. You can see in the first picture that some of the dye powder got stuck on the side of the jar, and the steam developed the color.

After the water, add vinegar. Double check the packets. Most of the colors take vinegar, which is a mordent, or color setting agent. A few of them, however, don't. To keep myself from accidentally putting vinegar where it doesn't belong, I covered the no vinegar jar with it's paper packet.
 Each jar gets 1 tablespoon of white vinegar, unless the packet says otherwise.

With the vinegar added [or not], the plastic lids go on and the jars of dye are set aside to cool down to room temperature. Yet another reason the plastic lids are so nice is that unlike the metal lids and bands, the plastic lids don't pose a burn hazard, nor will they seal during the cool down the way a gasket lid will. Our back porch was 35 degrees today, so the jars went to chill out there. This is a melamine caffeteria tray we use when dying eggs, and it's permanently dyed in places.

With such cool temperatures, the dyes are probably ready for use in four hours or so!

happy easter

 last year's [and some years before] eggs. 

three on the left are duck, the red on the far right is a certain type of chicken which I've forgotten the name. 

pysanke soup for the student teacher's soul

I haven't cleared this with anyone yet... I'm not even sure anyone even knows what a pysanke is.

But I have some. And I'm a broke graduate student.... I think you know where this is going. I sold some at church a few years ago...

I eat dinner and watch an episode of some tv show on Netflix, and I usually light a candle and scatter some wax on an egg while I'm at it - 45 minutes of down time, I'm not wasting my down time. I just mixed up the last of my dyes - this year it will be Scarlet, Pumpkin, Yellow, Turquoise, Royal Blue, Light Blue, Brown and Black. (I could make Browns and Steelers eggs again...). I wish I had a green, no such luck.

In any case, my goal was to take the eggs that I have and try to sell a few this year. I've got about four in the works, simple ones. I usually don't start the complicated ones until later in the season, after I've had a chance to get the feel for the kistka back, after it's collected dust for a year. But with everything that's going on, I'll probably have to stick to the easy ones.

randomly discovered that an egg that started in a turquoise dye bath dropped in brown will come out sort of a lilac purple. That only white one, in the right front corner of the egg carton is now lilac purple. I was going for turquoise and brown. So much for that.

eggs

And now for the real reason I keep this blog...
Let's start with Lent. Which is a far bigger deal in the Anglican church than the Methodist. At least the one I was going to.

I was a pysanke making fool this year, thanks in part to the generosity of space at church, where I would hang out between work and choir practice and make eggs. Also the generosity of a farmer in the town I grew up in, who handed me about 4 dozen fresh eggs over the course of 40 days for free because I was making art out of them, and they thought that was pretty cool [I gave them some decorated eggs as a thank you]. I actually had a few that I was able to sell. Maybe next year I'll have a better marketing campaign or something... right. Anyway, here's a small sampling of some of the eggs that I did this year, drying after being varnished. I used Krylon, one of their clear glossy coats with UV protection. It isn't sitting in front of me, so I'm not completely sure what it is. But there you have it. I'll have to retake pictures of the eggs I still have, since most of them were too close, and my camera doesn't have a zoom feature, alas. I would like to do more exploring the Pacific Northwest style, since it seemed to translate well into the wax resist medium. I have some traditional Ukranian designs(there, in the top corner is one with acorns, and the stars are pretty traditional as well), but with out more practice, I know I'll never truly get the hang of it. Very popular were the eggs I did showing scenes from "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe". There was a young fellow being baptised on Easter, and I made an egg for him of Peter fighting Fenris Ulf. He has two younger sisters... so I thought, oh, let's have a little fun with this, so they are on there as well, as Lucy and Susan...

forty days

It is that time of year again. The days are getting noticeably longer, clocks get set forward an hour, dizzying displays of everything concievable in a nauseating array of pastel colors screaming at you everytime you walk in the grocery store for some milk, yes it's... LENT!

Being protestant, I generally don't mark the passing of Lent with much thought, though I do realize the forty days leading up to Easter are symbolic of Jesus' time in the wilderness when He was being tested by Satan. An Anglican friend was visiting a few weeks ago and commented on the fact that we were having a worship arts festival at the beginning of Lent. The atmosphere in the sanctuary was highly charged, the singing shaking long idle dust from the rafters. Aparently, Anglicans don't say Allelujah during Lent. It's not a time for praising God [that comes Easter Sunday]. Forty days out of the year, that leaves 325 days... but I digress.

My point is until recently, I didn't pay much attention to the whole Lent thing. That is until art suddenly got involved. Years ago when my mother was single and my grandmother still alive and not crippled by arthritis, they stumbled on pysanke. My family is not Ukranian. Or Russian, for that matter, or any of the other ethnicities from whom pysanke came from. We're Welsh and Scottish and Sicilian [my mother and I are]. My mother was an art education major, and learned pysanke from a fellow student's mother, who was Ukranian. A few years later, my brother and I were born and she quit doing eggs because we'd get into the dye and smash the egg shells. When I was in college, mom pulled out her materials, ordered some new dye and taught me how to decorate eggs. And I'm not talking about hardboiled eggs and food coloring.

This year we tracked down some farm eggs, which had harder shells and are generally prettier than any brown, free range or organic egg you could find at a grocer. 7 dozen eggs later, we left the farm with duck eggs, Easter eggs [a lerger than jumbo size with a pale bluish color], Banty eggs, and button quail eggs [a dark speckled mocha color, no bigger than the end of your pinky - and too cute for words]. We lost a dozen, which had been stored on our back porch when the temperature plunged to the low teens one night. Ukranian eggs can be decorated raw, but traditionally, they have two holes pierced through the shell - one at both of the elipse ends - and the contents of the egg are blown out either mechanically with a tinsy bellows or by one's own breath. We will not be blowing out the quail eggs, of which there are a dozen, and we lost a dozen to the frost, so there's five dozen eggs that need to be blown out. What do we do with all the egg? You guess is as good as mine, but I saw a custard recipe that called for a dozen eggs, so that might be a good place to start.