A Twist on Pysanky

Teaching Pysanky (a form of Ukrainian Easter Egg dying) has been a passion of mine for almost 20 years.  This month I was asked to come up with a Christmas form of the medium.  So...Voila!  I designed a few ornaments for the Christmas tree.  The trickiest part of this project is that the class had to be divided into two segments.

  Tomorrow we will be doing the traditional wax resist egg dying with a single color and maybe a bit of spot dying. Here's the tricky part; I have to bring all the student's eggs home to varnish and blow the yolks out!  The drying time for the varnish is just too long for the class to hang out waiting to blow the eggs, and since the second segment is the following week, the varnish can't sit that long waiting for the yolks to be removed...That is just asking for trouble!

During the second segment we will be adding the jewelry findings and a few select embellishments for glitz.  I've enjoyed the creativity of trying to rethink this class.  Sometimes you just have to sweep the cobwebs out of your brain by switching something up!

As I always include a storage box for each egg, I was tickled to find silver and gold Chinese carry out boxes for a steal at Crafts 2000.  I think the ladies will be happy.  I also think that the time being pared down by breaking up the classes can be useful in other venues.  I'm thinking this could be a great ladies project at church for our Thursday night craft group.  Let me know what you think.