Every year at this time, we love to pull out the Ukranian eggs that we have been making since the girls were little. (Well, I was actually told by a Ukranian egg expert once, that our eggs can’t officially be called Ukranian eggs since we don’t officially use the Ukranian egg patterns and symbols. Since we take a more “creative” approach to our design choices, we are supposed to call our eggs “Art Eggs.” So here is our box of Art Eggs.
How to make Art Eggs:
First we blow out the eggs, then we use styluses with lumps of beeswax that we melt over candles. We dye the egg a light color and cover anything we want to save in that color with wax from a stylus. Then we dye it the next darker color and save again and so on and so on. It ends up looking like it is covered in black wax at the end. And then comes the fun part. We either hold it over a candle and gently wipe off the wax with a tissue and magically the beautiful design appears, or recently we figured out a way to do that last step in the toaster oven! Yep, it’s a mess. A big, fun mess. With a beautiful treasure at the end.
Here are some tips if you would like to take up Ukranian egg making–I mean Art Egg making:
- Turn on some good old movies that you’ve seen a million times so that you don’t actually have to watch them, because this is a slow and tedious process. Take plenty of snack breaks.
- One year we learned that you can actually leave the yolk inside the egg and not blow it out, and over time (like 5 years) it will dry up inside. Note: Store your ‘yolk-in eggs’ somewhere that could handle an explosion. This happened once and it was pungent.
- The year that it did happen, and we had them stored all together, we had to put them outside to air out. Note: Do not leave them outside in case it rains. We learned this the hard way, and the eggs from that year have a sort of washed effect.
- Buy these great egg holders that I just found this year at Target. Not only do they enable you to store many eggs in a small space, but they look pretty cool when they are full!
This is a tradition that your family might take wherever they may land. In fact, Ellen, do you have some pictures from your Ukranian/Art Egg making in California this year?? Love, Mom
