An Adventure in Pysanky.

Instead of being all lonely and boring this weekend, I took a little roadtrip by my lonesome (in hurricane-like conditions) to Pennsylvania to visit Val + Fam + The Momma Donna (lucky, right?).

Val, the craft queen, pulled out the big guns and taught us how to make pysanky. If you didn't already google that word, they are awesome Ukranian Easter Eggs. 

Lemme show you how it works:

Step 1: Plan out your egg, then draw on the egg in pencil the design you came up with. (Using some traditional  symbols and patterns). 

Step 2: Choose what lines/designs you want to stay white, and cover them with melted beeswax, using this cool little tool. (The darker lines on the egg are the wax).

Step 2: Dunk the egg in yellow! Then choose the parts you want to stay yellow and cover them in the wax. 

Step 3: Dunk it in the red! Then cover all the parts you want to stay red with wax.

Step 4: Dunk it in the black! 

Step 5: "The Unveiling". Melt all the beeswax and wipe it off, to reveal your beautiful designs!

Step 6: Stare at that beauty! (Even if the picture you took at 2 am is blurry and you didn't really know at the time because you'd just been staring into a candle melting off wax!) 

Then spray it with a hardening/shining agent. 

Now this is the part where I show you my beautifully completed egg, all hollowed out and perfect for my mantle piece.

Unfortunately, when I was carrying my dear egg back in the house to let dry all through the night, it rolled off it's little stand and went crashing to the ground. SPLAT. Egg guts everywhere. 

Being 2 a.m., and having just worked on the dear thing for several hours, my body started to shake and I told myself not to cry. And I cleaned up the yolky mess and threw my hours and hours of work down the drain (literally). 

I kept the little pieces of the shell and put them on a plastic egg, to maybe get some of them back together. 

Then I went to bed terribly sad, and thinking about the whole thing - and I came up with all these different moral of the stories: like, sometimes attention to detail isn't about how straight the lines are, but how careful you are with the egg in the end (and I promise that made sense at 3 a.m.). 

Or, how the reason these things are so cool are because they are so fragile and it's just a miracle they survive the process, so breaking one makes the others cooler (problem was I didn't have another...). 

The good news is that I took pictures so that you could all appreciate my hard work and how cool these things are, even though I currently have nothing to show for it :). 

And now to save you from the depression which you might be feeling with me... 

Look how amazingly gorgeous Audrey's hair is. 

And if that didn't bring up your spirits enough, how about some...

Hamburg and Frystown!? (I thought I was so clever putting those together. Silly Pennsylvania...)

Happy Easter!

PS I leave for London tomorrow!