Tales of a Pysanky Virgin

Last year I was introduced to the Ukrainian art of egg decorating, Pysanky. Since our group didn't get together this year for obvious reasons, I thought I'd share the ones I made last year.  Note that even though I used the traditional methods to decorate my eggs, they are not an accurate representation of this traditional art form in the least.  Pysanky eggs are created by alternating applications of wax  drawn with a kistka and dipping the eggs in dyes going from lighter to darker colors, then warming the wax and wiping it off to reveal the whole design.

I thought traditional Pysanky eggs looked too intimidating.  I'm not good at symmetry or uniformity, so I went and did my own thing.

I will say, having looked very closely at more than a few eggs trying to figure out my failings, I was surprised to see a lot of "perfect" designs, had flaws.  I'm not saying this to knock the artists, nothing will make those eggs anything less than the incredible works of art that they are.  I'm pointing this out because it's easy to look at someone else's work and see nothing but perfection and then look at your own work and see nothing but the mistakes.  If you're an artist, I know, that's what you do, but knock it off.  If you try this, cut yourself some slack, have fun and roll with the mistakes.

I don't have enough knowledge to write a tutorial, and I couldn't do better than what's out there.  I don't even have enough experience to say what's a great source of information, everyone seems to have a slightly different way of doing things. If it's a site dedicated to Pysanky, and there are many out there, it's probably written by people that have been doing this for decades and it's as good as any for a place to start.

What I'm prepared to offer here is a few insights from a Pysanky virgin's point of view and a few examples of non-traditional eggs. For instructional purposes I will be pointing out all my mistakes.

This was my first egg.  The dying process was blue, then pink (making a purplish blue), then black.  You can see fingerprints (bottom pic, center is the most noticeable) where I accidently touched the egg bringing it out of the first dye.  Human skin is gross and oily.  Wash your hands thoroughly when handling eggs, even when cleaning the eggs to prep them.  Don't apply lotion or hand sanitizer to your hands they will leave a residue. Really try to handle them as little as possible. And have a paper towel handy when you lift the egg out of the dye so you don't have to grab it to keep it from falling.  And watch that you don't set the paper towel on fire with the candle flame you are using to heat your kistka.  I'll say that again because it's really important, don't set paper towels on fire, especially when doing the final wax removal.

After you heat the wax in the kistka, make a test mark on a scrap piece of paper.  If the wax doesn't flow, it might not be heated enough or the kistka might be clogged.  If it flows too fast, you'll be thankful that big blob is on your paper and not your egg.   Test again until it flows evenly.  Do this each and every time you heat the wax, because the one time you don't, you will ruin your egg and consequently you're entire existence. No you won't, just keep going and pretend you meant to do that and most people wont even notice. Also regardless how careful you are, you might still end up with an uncontrolled blob, this life. (Bottom pic, left upper corner, big blob that was not part of the design)  The people using electric kistkas didn't seem to have this problem, but again too limited exposure on my part to be making any definitive statements.

It's helpful to sketch a design on the egg with pencil.  The process of removing the wax usually also gets rid of most the pencil lines.  But you can see here the marks on my spider's eyes are still visible.

In my limited experience, it seemed in small areas or thin lines where there wasn't a lot of wax to remove, the pencil marks were more prominent. I also found it's best to draw very lightly with a regular pencil.  I love my mechanical pencils but it was hard to write lightly with them.  The rough shell against the thin lead, left a lot of graphite in it's wake.

No you can not wash or rub the marks off a dyed egg.  The dye will rub or wash off also.  If the pencil mark is on an area that's been left white you can carefully try to remove it, but you might muck up a dyed area in the process and ruin your whole day.  A lot of things about Pysanky can ruin your whole day, such as the fragile state of eggs in general.  It is still a worthwhile pursuit, that can be fun as well as rewarding.

Here I tried making a few highlights on my web by randomly picking lines to cover with wax before the egg was dyed.  Obviously it just looks stupid and I should have made the whole web red.  What I discovered later is there is a whole other method Dryapanky, where you dye the egg and then scratch off a design.  I think that would produce the highlights I was hoping for but I haven't had a chance to try.

I found that besides doing a rough sketch on paper, doing a rough sketch in color was very helpful in trying to figure out the order different elements of the design needed to be waxed.  In the sketch I started with a black outline and then added details.  In the dying process, black will be the last color so you have to work backwards.

The hardest part was the black lines for the eye.  Doing that in the negative was obviously really difficult for me.  I wish those lines were much bolder. Also since the cat and the outline of the eye  were the only black components, the rest of the egg needed to be covered in wax.  You can see all the places I missed.  I think it works with the design, but I learned later a trick for covering a large area is to tip the wax out of the top of the kistka and smear it around.

Both images are on opposite sides of the same egg.  The order of colors for dying was white, yellow, orange, red and black.

The skull egg below is my favorite and it's just one egg with three designs.  This is the top view. 

For this I sketched my skull drawings on paper and then used graphite paper to trace them onto the eggs. You can see a lot of graphite lines are still visible on the finish egg.  The skull's were covered in wax so they would stay white, although I really liked the look of the soot infused wax and kind of wished I could've kept them like that.  Then the egg was dyed yellow.  The flower details where hand painted with dye.  Yes, you can do that.  And then the flowers were covered in wax.  This time I used wispy strokes of wax to cover a large area on purpose, and that's how I achieve the look of the top and bottom of the egg.  Then the whole thing was dipped in black.  

If you like my little egg stand it's a gold Lego dish on top of a clear inverted radar dish.  Fancy.

This last egg was done pretty much the same as the skulls.  All the small details are hand painted.  Doing that may require multiple applications to get the saturation of color you want. The only two colors the egg was dipped were blue and then black. 

 Yes siree, spring is just bursting forth from this egg.  

The biggest thing I haven't figured out and was hoping to work on this year, is what to do about the insides.  Technically you don't have to empty the eggs.  Over time eggs will eventually dry out, unless they leak or explode.  Adds a level of excitement you weren't expecting right? I liked working with full eggs because they sink to the bottom of the dye and once the inside is dry you will have a fully intact egg.  I followed these guidlines and every single egg eventually went bad.  Luckily none exploded, they only had small leaks.  But small leaks can make big stinks.

The other option is to empty the egg, either before or after dying. There's pros and cons to both and then there's the issue of varnishing them, but I don't have experience in any of that

Or maybe I did find the best method of preservation, pictures.  Because you never have to worry about pictures exploding or leaking noxious gases.

Pandemic Flair

I made a couple of masks with stuff I had laying around so I can go grocery shopping in style.  My greatest fear, aside from people dying a horrible death isolated from their loved ones, is unwittingly spreading this thing.  No one wants to be a Typhoid Mary.

Speaking of pandemicing with flair, HuffPost has compiled a bunch street art that is worth a gander.

For the masks I used the instructions from Joanns.  I should know by now one size doesn't fit all.  I wear a size small gas mask, so I probably shouldn't be surprised these are a bit big on me.  I had to shortened the elastic a lot to snug them up.  If you have a smaller, or larger noggin this link provides measurements for small, medium and large.

I would try my hand at making a small mask, but I've exhausted my supply of sewing patience.  I've always wished I would like sewing, there's so many amazing things I could make, but it's not going to happen.  My three stages of sewing are 1) excited anticipation 2) frustration 3) for the love of all things unholy this will have to be good enough because I can't take it anymore.

I don't know if this will help other sewing illiterates but I didn't have fusible interfacing and substituted that with a cotton sheet.  Months earlier I had salvaged sections of a sheet with a tear in it, saving the cloth to later make mummy wrappings.  It's a good quality tight weave.   The first mask I used a 12x9 rectangle for both the cotton sheet and the cotton graveyard fabric.  Folded over that's four layers and really bulky.  The second one I used a 6x9 rectangle of the sheet in-between the folded layers of the graveyard material and that was much easier to work with.

I'm sorry some of the print is lost in the folds, because it's a lovely pattern.  My son picked this fabric out a long time ago when he made a drawstring bag in Home Ec class, which only old people still refer to as Home Ec.

In other Covid19 news, the Bicycle playing card company predicted the toilet paper crisis years ago.

Biohazard Tentacles

It appears I had one more biohazard egg mashup in me.  Hopefully this is last because quite frankly aside from being cathartic, I don't see the point.  I'm not actually going to send out Corona Easter cards or frame these on my wall. Also there are just too many possibilities, and I'm awful about making decisions.  Photoshop is like being at the eye doctor. "Which is better one or two?  One or two?" Which is why there is also the following version.  

The octopus is from the Biodiversity Heritage Library.   They have many lovely tentacally pictures.  

And there's this one, that's not even eggy or Eastery at all.  

Frame and corner scrolls are from the Graphics Fairy.

Coronavirus Flavored Easter Eggs

I'm still playing around with photoshop, inspired by the cloud of impending doom hanging overhead. If I seem flippant, I truly don't mean any disrespect.  Sarcasm and art are my coping mechanisms.  I also been watching "So bad, they're good" horror movies.  

Garden Party Massacre - It's utterly ridiculous, but in a fun way.

Killer Sofa - I admit this one isn't great, ok it's really hokey, but I love how sinister the recliner is. It's expressions are priceless, this deadpan menace that's kind of adorable, achieved with a couple of mere upholstery buttons.  Actually you can save a lot of time and just watch the trailer.  I really love the song during the end credits, that's worth a listen, You're Cold by Bernardo Rao.

Wacko - This is my favorite bad movie during the lockdown so far.  I can't believe I didn't see this on a rental VHS, like I saw most of my horror back in the day.  And I'm kind of glad I didn't, because I think I appreciated it more now than I would have then.  It came out in '82 and it's a spoof on the horror movies that came out prior.  So for an old fart like me it was a nostalgic laugh down memory lane.  Julia Duffy is wonderful.  I would watch it again just to see the delivery of her lines.  She carries that perfect level of seriousness that's needed to balance the absurd context around her. The running pervy dad joke is wrong, but it comes up so often you find yourself reciting along like an audience participation film.  

Back to our regularly scheduled program, I can't decide which version I like better Corona Egg in Angry Red or Puke Pastel and either with or without a framed border.  Here they all are for your viewing pleasure.

My interpretation of the coronavirus is actually a picture of a Sundew leaf, again from the wonderful pictures made available by the British Library. 

Easter Pestilence

This is what my brain spits out when Easter coincides with a pandemic.  I think this would make a nice commemorative 2020 Creepster Easter card.   This year I imagine the Easter Bunny will be wearing a biohazard suit and giving out hand sanitizer.  Just kidding, he'll be practicing social distancing like a good rabbit and not even the Easter Bunny can get his paws on hand sanitizer.  

Flowers found on flickr courtesy of the British Library.

Framed Butterfly Curio

This is one of those projects that I've been sitting on for years. It's not that I'm a procrastinator, or a hoarder, I am merely extremely patient when it comes to waiting for the powers that be, to converge upon my little brain with divine inspiration.

This time inspiration came via Oddity Asylum. Do check out their etsy shop, they have beautifully framed specimens, all ethically sourced.

I obtained my specimen the way I usually seem to procure dead things, from a friend cleaning house and deciding it's probably something I could use. But here is the origin story for my specimen:

I'm a little surprise there's no mention of the species, but it would appear it belongs to the Morpho family. Not to be confuse with Morpheus who belongs to the Endless family. 

As I mentioned, I've had this for quite awhile and I've also been making a conscious effort to not buy any new art supplies. To make this project happen I had to cave and buy the metal filigree corners and I couldn't even find what I wanted local.

I bought this mix from Amazon, actually Smile.Amazon.com, so at least my favorite charity could benefit. Every little bit counts.

This is what my random selection ended up being. The metal is very thin, easily bent by hand. An attribute that I think will come in handy if I use them to adorn a round bottle or ornament. I wouldn't use them to embellish anything that didn't have a solid surface to give support.

And if I didn't plan on painting over them anyway I would be disappointed in the color selection. The gold was the only finish I didn't like, which is just my personal taste. But there's no way to predict if you are going to get enough pieces of the same shape and finish for a project.

I forgot to take a before picture, but this is close. Here I've just laid the embellishments on to see if I like them.

Here's everything but the embellishments painted black. I actually had enough of the same finish that I could have left them as is, but I like everything all black, letting the butterfly take center stage. I toned down the gold on the original mat, both by painting it champagne gold, and by adding and wiping away black paint.

I don't know anything about, nor did I research, mounting butterflies. I don't know if painting the mat with acrylics will have any long term affect on the butterfly. I did let the mat and frame cure for a week before reassembling.

The butterfly was actually mounted onto a thick glob of rubbery white stuff, so the butterfly doesn't actually touch the mat. I used a box cutter blade to shimmy underneath it and separate it from the mat, which thankfully it did easily. And I was careful to move the butterfly by handling the white glob only. After painting and curing, I used craft glue to re-adhere the white glob to the mat. And this is what it looks like in proper lighting without the glare of the glass frame.

One more project down to add to my collection of oddities.

Repurposed Coffin Case

My husband recently bought a secondhand guitar and had no interest in using the coffin case that came with it.  He was thinking about selling it until he saw the gleam in my eye, and I'm not going to lie probably a little drool, when I saw the black coffin with red velvet interior.

Before I eviscerated it, I got my skeleton out and tried a few poses to make sure it would be truly useful as a prop.

Gutting it was easy, the storage area was just a lid with a screw on each side and a couple of staples. There was also a little velvet covered bump for the other end of the lid to rest on.  For the moment I left the bump where it was at.

The middle hump was easy to remove it was just a velvet covered piece of styrofoam glued to the bare wood.  When I say velvet I actually mean velvet material quilted to a thin layer of foam batting.

Removing this left me with a bare spot in the middle and two slits in the velvet trim on either side.

There was no way I could have done a perfect patch job, the top and bottom were two separate pieces that where not quite lined up. But if I had wanted to spend the time to make this as seamless as possible I would have pulled up about a half inch of the velvet along both sides of the bare spot.  Then I would have trimmed the foam backing about a quarter inch so that it was a straight line and tucked the velvet material underneath the edge of the foam.  Then I would have continued on with the following, except my patch piece would have had to be precisely sized with all the foam removed from the velvet tucked underneath.

But I figured I could still make it look pretty darn good in half the time. First I removed any remaining glue with a razor blade.  Then I cut a cereal box to the shape I wanted.  I made it a little longer to cover the jagged edges of the velvet already in place and little narrower in width to accommodate the width of the velvet and foam batting.

I covered the cardboard with materiel I peeled off the styrofoam.  Hot glue is my least favorite bonding material to work with, but for this project it was perfect.

I still had the two side slits to contend with.   Trying to fix them with more velvet seemed foolhardy, so I decided to cover them with ribbon trim.  I used a wide faux leather ribbon, trimmed with sparkly fringe (Clearance purchase for the win!).   Since I thought it would look weird to just have it in two spots,  I evenly spaced strips of ribbon around the whole coffin.  

That meant I could remove the little bump at the top and cover the glue stain without it looking out of place.

The outside vinyl was torn in a couple places.  I colored the wood underneath with black sharpie, glued the vinyl back down with E6000 and used strapping taping to hold it flat while it dried. The final step was to replace the screws that had held the storage lid with much shorter screws so I didn't have to fix the holes.

I'm happy with how it turned out and it didn't take all day.  And now I have a cute coffin prop.  No, it's not big enough to actually fit a skeleton, but visually it does the trick and it's not as unwieldly as a full size prop.  It stores easily and has it's own carrying handle, which makes it pretty perfect for me.

Last year for Halloween on a whim I made my skelly dog a headbanger.  I already have a punk vulture and I've been meaning to do the same for my skelly frogs.  I have needle felted green liberty spikes for the big one and I'm working on some crazy red Johnny Rotten hair for the smaller one.  I just have to rock out my regular skeleton and I think I've got a band.

Needle Felted Monster Cactus

A long, long, long time ago Lady M asked me how long it takes to make one of these felty things and I had no idea.  This is the one project where I actually paid attention to the time.   In total, it took three hours, that included snacks, drinks, chatting and moving the eyeballs three or four times.

All you see here took an hour and a half and most of that was spent on the details.  Making the flower took the rest of the time because I felted each petal individually and it's harder to needle felt thin flat objects.  Sometimes wet felting is a better option for thin pieces but you do have to wait for them to dry.

Size wise you can see what three hours got me.  There's a trade off with size, obviously the larger an object the more stabbing that's involved.  But it's easier to do the detail work, which gets fussier the smaller you go.

This is what he would look like with flaming red curly locks.

I should say for safety purposes you should never needle felt distracted, angry or under the influence.  The needles are very sharp.   That being said, we generally have cocktails on Stabby Nights and on this particular night we had Raspberry Mimosas which were quite yummy and as a bonus I now have this awesome bottle to use for potions.  

The inspiration for this cactus came from Woolbuddies.  I don't have any experience with the kits, but the book is awesome and I think the style is easy for beginners to pick up.  Many of my stabby friends started out making the simpler Woolbuddy creatures.  There are a few how-to videos that are worth checking out.  The frog and the penguin are favorite among my friends.   

Mini Creepmas Frames

This Creepmas I saw a few different references to the lovely ornaments at Me and Annabel Lee.

While mine are nothing like those, I rather like theirs better, they were the inspiration for me to finally use these mini frames I picked up at a garage sale years ago.  My frames are approximately 5x7cm, outside dimensions, so perfectly suited for my tiny Creepmas tree.

The frames where already dark in color, highlighted in bronze but they were too shiny and perfect.  It made the metal frames look like plastic.  I covered them with a flat black and randomly highlighted the raised areas.  I also added some rhinestones, clearance purchase of course. Even the black ribbon was bought on clearance, thrifty down to the last.

I went with what I consider to be Creepmas images.  The image of the vintage creepy Santa is all over the internet.  As is the dapper owl, who in my mind looks perfectly attired for Victorian holiday festivities.  The skeleton child with her goat seems very Yuletide to me and this altered image is by Kelloween.

And on the subject of Yule goats, I really love the goats in this video.  

Creepmas Cookies

I said I was going to try making Yeti cookies and I did, but it wasn't quite the effort I put into the Krampus ones. The kids had their cookies to decorate and I had to make some "normal" ones, so there wasn't a lot left for me to play with. To be a honest my Yeti's are kind of a bust, but I have high hopes of doing better next year. I do like the one in the middle, he turned out pretty cute. For him I used an upside-down snowman cookie cutter.

I tried some mouth/tongues similar to the Krampus with rolled out gumdrops and black sugar. The horns are peppermint candy corns. The center Yeti's nose is a piece of Buncha Crunch, which is a nugget of Nestle's Crunch. If you have low expectations for peppermint candy corns, these will meet those expectations. They also infuse the Buncha Crunch with their lackluster peppermint flavor. But boy do they make cute little festive horns.

Here are some of the kid's cookies, upper right is a gingerbread man bleeding from multiple stab wounds, below that is a Death Snowflake, the candy corn being it's death ray and the skulls and tombstone representing the number of planets it has destroyed. At the very bottom with a candy corn tie is a mobster snowman, and above him is a vampire snowbat with candy corn fangs. They might taste like minty crap, but those candy corns sure are versatile.

Next year I plan on making more ghosts, I like how he turned out with the black skulls for facial features. The coffin on the left is my second one, definitely an improvement compared to the one on the right. Word of advice don't try to edge a coffin in one continuous band of frosting, it almost looks like a flipflop.

Second word of advice, less is more when it comes to color. 

I like the Creepmas garland, but I should have made it with fewer colors.

This was going to be a Yeti and somehow it ended up as an angry Yule goat. 

I think I need more of these next year too.

And more unicorn snowbat creatures, with bone arms.

I thought these bats were cute too.

And just to play fair I made holly with a bat cookie.
It would probably look more like holly if I had bothered to make green frosting. 

I used my usual recipe for the cookies and frosting. I don't believe I've ever made buttercream frosting in advance, but time constraints necessitated it this year. I just let it come to room temp and whipped it again before using. It was kind of nice not having the mess of making frosting on top of the mess of decorating cookies, I don't know why I've never done this before.

Another thing I liked this year, and maybe this has been around for a while and I'm just finally noticing, was the little $1 packets of holiday sprinkles at Michaels. It was nice buying a variety of holiday cheer in reasonable amounts that will get used up in the next two years.