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!