Confession: I bought a craft supply already.
Target's wooden eggs are going to help me share traditional pysanky egg designs with my Sunday School students in a way that can stand up to little kids!
When I write pysanky, they usually look like this:
These are more the Ukrainian style. Some are designs from the books published by the Ukrainian Gift Shop (Find them at: ukrainiangiftshop.com). Some are my own designs - both with traditional elements and some that I think are just plain fun, like a series of mayryoshka-inspired pysanky I made a few years ago. They're made with a writing tool - a kistka - that is pretty much a very tiny funnel on a stick. It's great for wax, but it doesn't translate well to paint.
These are a simplified version of the kind you might find made in the southeastern part of Poland, the eastern part of Slovakia, or western Ukraine:
We make these at my home church every year, as part of a larger effort to share our customs and to fill Easter "baskets" full of treats and traditional foods for friends and members of our parish who might need a hand carrying on our traditions that year due to health or life events.
Last year, my husband and I were busy getting ready for our wedding, scheduled for just 2 weeks after Easter. Things were so crazy that making our own bread and cheese was just not going to work out, and it was SO amazing when we were surprised with a "basket" that had been put together for us by our friends! It really is such an amazing tradition, and the church ladies who spearhead this effort every year are simply wonderful.
This style for pysanky writing uses the head of a pin to apply the wax. This works very well with paint, and gives an effect much like the wooden eggs you'll find sold as souvenirs in shops across Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, and Russia. If you're really daring, try a toothpick for even smaller writing!
You will need:
wooden eggs
a plain wood pencil with a new eraser
metal-headed straight pins
acrylic paints in various colors
a palette or paper plate to use as a paint palette
paintbrush (foam are best)
egg drying rack (optional but VERY helpful)
shellac or sealer - I used milk paint sealer instead of my usual shellac, as I'm aware that the youngest recipients may need to be reminded not to put these in their mouths
Paint the egg your background color. Use your paintbrush for this step. Make sure you'll have a good contrast with the colors you'll choose to write your egg. You want the design to show up!
It took me 2 or 3 coats of paint to cover up the egg. I touched up my fingerprints on the eggs after applying each coat, after putting the egg down on the drying rack to dry. Be careful, the wet paint makes the eggs slippery!
Hint: I recycled the lid of a foam takeout tray as a palette, since my real palette is still awol.
While your eggs dry, look for inspiration.
The Carpatho-Rusyn Center has an article about pysanky that is accompanied by some beautiful pictures HERE.
I also simplified some of the designs I found on Pinterest HERE.
THIS ARTICLE tells a bit about traditional designs.
A number of the clearer images I found describing traditional designs have clearly been scanned from the instruction books offered by the Ukrainian Gift Shop. You can find those books HERE, and I will not be reproducing them or linking to them on my page.
However, THIS blog includes a scan of a sheet of the basic information offered by the UGC. Scroll down on the page to find the pink image. The story is also interesting! I have a copy of that very same paper around here somewhere, and it was one of the very first pysanky resources I was ever given, back when I was 7!
Push the point of one of your straight pins into the head of your pencil eraser. Hold your pencil upside down and, holding your new writing tool like you would a regular pencil, practice making dots. It should look like this:
(One of our awesome church ladies demonstrating!)
Write your design! I start by finding the top and bottom of the egg and marking them with a dot, then spacing out where the rest of my work will go with more dots. I use finger-spacing as an indicator... for me, each egg is 6 fingers high. These wooden eggs are uniform, which is nice.
Do not try to do the whole design at once, as the paint needs to dry and it will be too easy to smear the paint as you change your grip on the egg. For some of my eggs, I painted the side band on first, and worked on another egg while the first dried.
Dip the pinhead in paint, then tap onto your egg for dots. Tap, then drag, the pinhead for a drop-pull effect. Both the heart shapes in the flowers above and the yellow design below were created using that drop-pull effect. The designs I used are intentionally simple, but skillful pysanky artists can form anything from waves to words with the same basic technique. This technique seems to work best with a paint that is on the more watery side, so cheaper acrylic paints will work very well.
Finally, seal the eggs. Shellac works well, but comes in pretty large cans, so you'll have a LOT left over. Craft stores like Michael's have spray sealer, and also little tubes of sealer right in their acrylic paint aisle. That's probably the most convenient. I used milk paint sealer because I had it on hand and wanted as nontoxic a seal as possible.
Take lots of pictures of your creations. You'll want pictures of your work to save long after you've gifted them all!
When your wooden pysanky eggs are dry, share them or display them!
For even easier pysanky images to share with younger children, check out the shrink-wrap style egg covers offered by the folks at Egg-in-Wrap. Eggs slip into the colorful plastic sleeves, and the sleeves will form to the egg when dipped in hot water. They're another great way to decorate real or plastic eggs with pysanky-style images that will brighten an Easter basket and (if made on plastic eggs!) can last for years to come. Check out their site HERE.
Happy egg writing!
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