More Eggs!

Next Weekend I'm going to Stockholm with a few friends and my cousin was kind enough to let us stay in his flat. So I decided to make two eggs for his daughters since when I went to visit them they wouldn't let me stop drawing pictures for them.

This is one side of the first one

Here's the other side

The second one

The other side of the second one.

Then I decided that I'd have a bit of fun and make one that has meaning to it, or at least all of the designs have a certain meaning, according to a website that I found on pysanky. 

So this egg has two rams on it, I chose the ram because 1. he's cute 2. I'm born the year of the ram and 3.  they are symbols of strength, dignity, leadership and perseverance. So the next band around the egg (called an eternity band) is a symbol of protection. Then the diamond sieves symbolize the separation of good and evil. Next the pink waves around the egg symbolize harmony and immortality.

In between the two rams is a sun which symbolizes life, warmth and love. 

If you want to look at what all the symbols that can be made represent, here is the website that I used Pysanky Symbolism.

National Museum of Scotland

For my architectural history class I have to write an essay on a building in Edinburgh, describing the building and giving a critical analysis. I chose to write about the National Museum of Scotland, built in 1998, that sits in the middle of Old Town. The great thing about this is that it's pretty close to my flat so today I went to the museum and took tones of notes and pictures of the architectural aspects of the museum.  I had intended on actually looking at the exhibitions but the architecture of this building stuck out so much that I didn't have any time to look at the exhibitions.

I didn't actually take this picture, I had to get it off the Internet. It was raining today so the picture wouldn't have done the building justice. But as you can tell the building is very modern and sticks out among all of the older buildings around it. 

This is the main entrance part of the museum...doesn't exactly look like a museum right?

This is looking down from the 5th floor at the main entrance.

All along the stairs and in random parts of the museums there were these seats carved into the walls, which I thought was very cool.

There were tons of these niches and cut outs in the walls that serve absolutely no purpose but they were part of the reason I never looked at the exhibition, they were everywhere! And always different shapes...

See here are more odd cutouts...I don't think I even looked at the displays beneath them.

I thought this was really cool. Again serve no purpose, but you can see through them to the other side and I guess they make going down stairs a little more interesting.

I'm certainly going to have my work cut out for me analyzing this building. There was really so much to it and I actually got lost quite a bit (my map didn't help). Maybe I'll go back one day and actually look at the exhibit, which shows the changes Edinburgh's gone through since it's founding. 

Pysanky

With my free time I have been dying eggs in a special way called Pysanky. What it is is you heat up a tool called a kistka, dip it in beeswax and then draw the wax onto the shell of an egg. What ever you draw with wax will be the first layer, which is white (or brown depending on the original color of the egg). Next you dye the egg in any color you want, and then draw on the wax again to keep that color. You keep dying the egg until your design is finished and then at the very end melt off all the wax, revealing your colorful design. At this point you have to "blow out" the egg, which means you poke two holes in the egg, one on top and one at the bottom and then literally blow out the yoke inside. This part is actually quite disgusting to watch, and if you use black dye be prepared to look like you're wearing black lipstick...
But at the end you're left with something beautiful and delicate. I love doing it because it calms me down and relieves my stress (course it can add stress if it doesn't go my way), but it's still something I really enjoy doing. So the past few days I've made three eggs. Now I bought new dyes, and I'm not used to them yet so I've been having a little bit of trouble with them, and they haven't exactly turned out the way I've wanted but they still look cool!

This is the kistka

This egg gave me the most problems, the dye didn't coat the egg evenly and the coloring was off, so I didn't get all of my designs on the egg.

This was made with a brown egg, this time the black dye gave me a lot of problems...

This egg turned out better then the others, the only problem was that the brown was really supposed to be red and then I was going to dye it a darker brown to make the deer. 

So now I think I understand how the dye's work and I can really make them look cool, so I'll put up more pictures when I make more!

Oh yea, awesome thing, my flatmate found a mouse in her bed yesterday...that makes me just soooo happy!