Egg craft do’s and don’ts-how can even unborn chickens be such a pain the ass?

It’s has been a couple weeks since I started down the egg paved road of Pysanka and I am no saner now than when I started.  But that train may be on a one way track no matter how I pass my time.

I have learned a lot of fun ways to demolish something you have been working on for half a day. Learn from my mistakes so that some good comes of this OR be sentenced along with me to the scrambled egg diet, ummmm eggs!

I will share some of my most spectacular screw ups, there are more than this.

Don’t leave the eggs in vinegar over night.  Even if you didn’t do it on purpose the vinegar does not care and will eat your egg anyway.

Do check your eggs for cracks BEFORE you spend hours drawing and dying them.

Don’t think to yourself-  “self, if we make the hole just a little smaller the egg will be prettier when it’s done as there will be less hole”  Because when you go to blow your egg out, the egg will think to itself-  “self, our insides can’t get outside through that foolish little hole, lets just escape through the side of the shell”  You are not smarter than the egg.  Well I’m not, you might be.

Do get out the dermel you will thank me later. Use a small abrasive tip about the width of the hole you want to end up with.  They are only a few bucks at the hardware store.

Don’t use the ‘drilling’ tool that comes with the egg blower.  It will only give you false hope and broken eggs.

Do paint the eggs BEFORE bowing them out, they are more structurally sound and you don’t have to plug the end. Plus they will sink rather than float in the dyes.

Don’t forget that it is an egg and it WILL brake if you give it an excuse.  No matter how much wax and dye you put on it underneath it all it is just an egg.

Do be creative and experiment with patterns and drawings.  I have not found a combination of symbols yet that renders the object molecularly unstable resulting in an explosion.  Have no fear.  Though I suppose, you could create an image so ugly that it would begin the long awaited zombie apocalypse everyone has been squawking about for the past decade.  It seems good a reason as any for how the earth will be overrun by cannibalistic beings.   COME ON PEOPLE! I am so over zombies.  Can we make movies about something else now? PLEASE.

Sorry…

I started doing landscapes using the color of the egg as part of the the finished picture.  We get some eggs that are light yellow with speckles and I found that they look like the moon.  If you cover those parts with wax first so that in the end you are left with a perfect moon.

We get some beautiful dark brown eggs too so I  started doing redwoods, apple trees and mountains.  For the redwoods I put the egg on its side and you have to spin it to see the top of the tree.  After all you can’t see the top and bottom of a real redwood tree in the same glance.

I did some other trees too using the eggs shell for the bark.

We have very green eggs and so I used them to make vines.

It has been a lot of fun but I think I’m going back to sewing soon, you can only turn your kitchen into an egg laboratory for so long.

Now I have to figure out what the hell to do with all of them…

(If you click on this it will take you to a larger gallery, I’m not saying you didn’t know that just that I only recently figured it out. Don’t judge me. Do click on the gallery 🙂 )

The leaves are dyed the vine is original shell.

he leaves are dyed the vine is original shell.

If you start by covering the shell and leaving stripes you can etch lighter browns and give the truck different shades of brown.

Looks just like it right? All I did was leave that part alone 🙂

Roots to tip 🙂

look two for one, notice you can nearly see the hole in the top though.