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Pysanky | Ukranian decorated eggs

My not!sister makes these too: 

Pysanky by Nepenthe

/obligatory familial boost

Two or three times over the years, in two different Girl Guide troops, they taught us to make what they described as “Ukrainian Easter eggs”. Every single time, the Guiders appeared to think this would be a more novel way to celebrate Easter, rather than the normal boring Easter eggs that we would obviously already be familiar with.

To this day, I am unsure how else one makes Easter eggs.

My fannish!sister, whose family is…Wendish? Something Eastern European that’s not Ukranian, but the egg designs are similar, learned her technique from her mother. It involves little pots of dye, and wax. You plan out the design, and dip the egg in the first colour (let’s say yellow), then paint over in wax the parts that you want to keep yellow. Then you dip it in, say, green. Paint over what you want to keep green. Then dip it in red…etc. until you have the final design. Then you melt off the wax (I forget how) and poke a hole in the end to let the egg white/yolk gloop out. Very carefully! (Can’t remember why you do that at the end rather than the beginning—probably because the egg is more fragile for painting if it’s just the shell.)

There may be other ways to do it. When I was a kid, the few times we painted eggs involved watercolour paints and markers or something. :P Not the same. 

You may have misinterpreted. I’m saying that the method you’re describing is the only way I have ever made Easter eggs. Every time there was an Easter-egg-making session of a group I was part of, it was always Ukrainian-style, the idea being (either implicitly or explicitly) that teenagers would be bored with the “usual” ways of making Easter eggs by now, so let’s try a different way. Thing is, I’ve never done the usual way, only “here’s what you do when you’re sick of the usual” (and always introduced to me as such).

(A bit like fairy tales, really. I learned Jack and the Beanstalk and Goldilocks and the like by watching Looney Tunes do several different parodies of each tale and noting the common elements. Nobody ever teaches you Fairy Tales 101 because they all assume somebody else already did, so you have to learn 101 by taking the advanced classes and reading between the lines.)

(I did suspect Easter Eggs 101 involved markers.)

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