More stuff to read, yay!

Okay, so! I made some pysanky again this year. :D

( Photo under cut! )

This took roughly one evening + one day, as well as a bit of extra time for the guidelines and emptying eggs and such.

I like the colour scheme that I used this year (a so-called "Trypillian" set) but I wasn't as happy with the dyes themselves - I used a different company this year than last year, and I feel like I had to leave the eggs in them much longer than I had to last year, in order to get a nice deep colour. And even after leaving the eggs in the black for 10 minutes, it was still not as much of a nice, crisp, deep black as last year's shade - you can't really tell by the photograph, but it's very obvious in real life.

This year's dyes were by Ukrainian Eggcessories, and last year's were by Best Pysanky. I think I will use BP's next year - or at the very least for the black. I was, however, very impressed with UE's Yukon Gold; it's a gorgeous deep colour and I was very happy with that one and will definitely use it again.

When I was in Victoria, I was able to pick up a book on writing pysanky: Eggs Beautiful: How to Make Ukrainian Easter Eggs by Johanna & Loretta Luciow and Anna Kmit. Having a paper reference was really helpful with deciding how to do the eggs this year. Quite an improvement over previous. Aside from some actual designs, they provide lots of little ideas for individual embellishments and band styles etc. I didn't follow any of these exactly, but I did draw inspiration from there.

This year, I put down guidelines in pencil before applying wax. Just the main lines; I didn't draw everything. I was kind of worried that it would be visible through the dye, and to a degree it is. But a lot of it gets wiped off during the wax-removal process, and you can't really see it unless you look very closely, so I think I'll do this next year as well. It's still very difficult to get lines actually straight rather than wobbling all over the place, but at least with the pencil down it's easier to get them more or less in the ballpark of where I want them to be.

I bet next year's will be even better. ☆