Inspiration for an Easter Craft (early) or Homemade Wedding Gifts (late)

-->I hate to be the one to interrupt my mom's various series that you are all engrossed in. But I have had requests for posting pictures of the wedding gifts I made last summer for my siblings.

And, the truth is, that they're more seasonally appropriate now than they were in the summer, because they're an Easter craft that one usually would produce during the season of Lent. Anyone out there heard of Pysanky?

{If you have, and you are an expert and a purist, please don't judge me for what will follow.}




Part of the collection we have amassed as a family over many years.

In my junior or senior year of high school, I suddenly got the bug to turn our family Holy Week tradition into a year-round obsession. I'm the one of the family who has most taken after Habou, the resident artist... she trained me as a little girl!

Me working back when I lived at Little Gidding. At this point I accepted that I was one of those crazy ladies who does a seasonal craft out of season. But hey, the results started to look like the photos I had previously only dreamed about...

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I never clean my candlesticks. I like to see (and use) the remains of all the candles I've burned through.

Pysanky are originally made as gifts: back in old Ukraine (so I hear; we're not Ukrainian at all), the ladies would spend their Holy Week designing them with love and prayer, bring them to their village churches to be blessed on Easter Sunday, and then hand them out to friends with blessings and good wishes.

I needed to work up to that tradition of giving them away. After a lot of mental preparation, I made one for a friend on her wedding -- but didn't think it was good enough to give. A few years later, I took the leap and designed one for a coworker on the occasion of his daughter's birth.

The Irish name Aine means "sunlight."

Pysanky (pronounced - as far as I can tell - "pi-san-key" and derived from a Ukrainian word meaning "to write") is a symbol-heavy craft. It's very motif-based, with a language relating to the Pascal Mystery that one "writes" on to the egg - which is itself a symbol of the Resurrection and rebirth in Christ - in colors that are also significant (red: Christ's passion; green: the plenty of the earth, etc.).

One time, Habou's friend gave her some beautiful goose egg shells for the purposes of Pysanky. Habou bequeathed these shells to me to use to my heart's content. I put them in the cupboard and said, "One day when I have enough skill and a really good idea, I'll move on to those goose eggs."

They sat there on a high shelf for about 5 years.

Until the Summer of Weddings! I was ready to use them and, what’s more, to give them away!

I have preparatory process for any pysanky I do, but these particular eggs I needed to get just right. The first phase is always a sketch in two dimensions. This is the egg for Rosie and Philip. My inspiration is from Rosie's wedding: the colors she chose and her signature flower, lavender.


Now, I had never worked with anything but a standard chicken egg before. There are so many variables in pysanky... it can be daunting.

How will the shell take the dye (this varies, literally, with every single egg)? I have to be very patient and take my time once I get to sketching directly on the shell.

How will a goose eggshell take pencil markings? I'm not going to stain the white, am I? (No way to tell but to try!)

To begin, I did an entire regular-sized pysanka to test colors and design ideas. This helped me develop the sketch phase of my full-sized project. (It's also a great opportunity to get a few mistakes out of my system.)

One has to think through a design carefully, step by step. The process goes from light colors to dark colors, and there's only one shot per color. Decide at the end that you want some more white detail? Too late – you had only one chance at the very beginning!


Here it looks like I've drawn in black pen over my pencil sketch. But what you're seeing is actually black wax applied (hot) using the tools you see in the foreground. That wax is sealing on a layer of white that will show up at the end when I melt all the wax away.

Here's the egg a few steps later. I've dipped the egg in yellow dye, written over it with wax, and now I'm moving on to this pale orange. I put my layer of wax on to this color to seal on some designs in orange. I'm "writing" the design onto the egg.

Here comes the red layer... It's a very time consuming craft. Each color/layer of wax takes anywhere between 1 and 3+ hours to complete. It takes a lot of focus and careful control. There's no erasing in this system: once the wax touches the egg, it seals on that color for good - once a stroke is on it's on forever!

The obsessively slow pace gives me plenty of time for thought. Sometimes I listen to music while I work. I've placed myself in the middle of the kitchen (much to my family’s inconvenience), so there's plenty of conversation around.

Mom often gets frustrated with me when I "perch" right in the middle of everything in the kitchen. But I can't help it -- I get my best inspiration in there! I'm not exactly sure why; it's mysterious.

It's also mysterious that I manage to "perch" without spilling dyes and smashing eggshells all over everything. But I just like working in the heart of the home.

Since pysanky originated as a way to celebrate and reflect on the pascal mystery, I think it's important to keep the meditative associations. The smell of melting beeswax, the rhythm of the strokes along the curve of the shell, even the pain of the cramping in my hand after several hours at a time... all these things comprise part of my prayer.

I think of the newlywed couple. I pray for their future together and tell Our Lord about my hopes for them...

Sometimes my work goes late into the night. It can be hard to find a stopping place - it's so addictive! - but I always love to watch the smoke rise from the candle, signaling the end of this session. Each day I look forward to resuming my “pysank-ing.”

After a few days' work, I've completed all my colors and removed the wax. Below the lumpy black mess that gradually accumulated, here are the designs revealed!

Here's the goose egg next to the trial run egg. I didn't stick to the originally plan strictly, but I'm happy with how it turned out!

The final step is to gloss the egg. This strengthens the shell to protect against cracks and preserves the color of the dye; mainly, though, it's that extra polish that we love!

In between the many layers of gloss, I get a start on the next egg, this time for Nick & Natasha. This one I was making before the event of the wedding, and I wasn't as involved in the planning so I didn't know all the details.

I wrote to Natasha and asked her what her wedding flowers were going to be. She mentioned "roses and bachelor buttons." I ran with that... and left her to guess why I cared. Once again I made a regular-sized test-egg. Then, after much sketching and planning, I jumped right in!

This one would have a simpler color scheme (her wedding was blue and yellow), but I had to take more time at the beginning with a lot of white detail and planning ahead.

It was difficult to get the goose eggs into the jars I normally use to store the dyes.

Here my egg is dyed yellow to my satisfaction. I'll now put on the wax layer over this color.

My waxing is done, and now all I have to do is dye the egg in the final color.

How will the final color go on? There's just no telling. I've practiced the colors on a chicken egg, but I can't be 100% sure that the blue will work the same on the goose egg.

But I have a good feeling about it. And there's no going back anyway!

Let 'er rip.

Sometimes you love a color so much, and you love the way the wax looks over it, it's hard to continue the process - you just want to leave it as is!

Especially since, sometimes, the final results are just disappointing. And then you can't help but think, "what if I had just left it in its middle stage?" or "I shouldn't have tried for that last color! I went too far!"

But more often than not, it just gets more exciting as it goes. See? As the shell color gets darker, you can start to see through the wax to the lighter colors sealed below.

This is the messy part.

A familiar sight. When we were younger and we all did this faithfully all through Holy Week,

our hands were the tell-tale signs at the Easter Vigil on Saturday night. I didn't know this then, but it can come off in one day... with a lot of very hot water and a lot of scrubbing. This craft is hard on the hands, since obsessive washing (and, often, vinegar rinsing) is required to preserve the eggshell's purity during all the handling.

Nothing left to do with this guy but set it aside and let the blue settle.

Meanwhile, I throw another layer of gloss on the completed Rosie & Philip egg.

Then - wax off! Polish on! The final reveal!

Both eggs are inspired by the colors and flowers the ladies chose for their weddings, but I also incorporated traditional pysanky motifs and patterns -- hopefully a suitable application of a traditional form.

Let's take a nice look at them before we send them off to the honeymooners... Can I do it? After all these hours and days of work, can I exercise detachment and send them away?

Yes. At this point, I want the couples to have them; I'm ready to pack them up with my love. (After obsessive photographing, of course.)

And it's easier to give gifts to family, you know? It shouldn't be too long before I get to see them again.

And yes, I packed them very carefully.

{I got started doing this as a very little girl doing sloppy, splotchy designs on little eggs on Holy Thursday with the rest of my family! Starter kits for pysanky are easy to find and affordable, and the craft is not as daunting to figure out as it may look.}