SuperDewa Photography
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I am new to blogging, so bear with me as I learn what the heck I'm doing. Until I am fully comfortable here, you will continue to find me and my photos more often on my flickr stream. Feel free to look around, leave comments, and ask me any questions. I'm open to suggestions if you play nice!

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Thursday, April 21, 2011

Eggs and Randomness

This past week's Picture Inspiration prompt was to bring our camera everywhere so that when something random and wonderful popped up, we'd be ready. This was hard for me because I already take my camera everywhere with me, and most of what I shoot is actually totally random. So I had to look harder for something that said random to me. More on that at the end of the post.

Yesterday our friends came over to dye Easter eggs with us. We (actually S) blew out the eggs the day before and used the eggs to make matzoh brei for lunch, because we do elements of both Easter and Passover. I love mixing the two traditions like this.

We used Ukrainian egg dying tools and dyes, not because any of us hails from the Ukraine, but because they are a lot more interesting than food coloring or drug store dyes. If one is making true pysanky, one uses raw eggs and goes through an elaborate process of turning them for months to keep them from going bad, but we blew ours out first.

This type of egg dying involves scraping beeswax into kistkas, melting the wax over a candle flame, and then using the kistka to draw designs with it on the egg. After drawing a design, one dyes the egg and then adds another color of dye. I was going to say it's harder than it sounds, but I'm realizing it doesn't sound that easy. I find it very difficult and can't imagine being able to get the intricate designs of traditional pysanky.

easter egg dying blog boards

As you can see, the candle flames add a lovely atmosphere to the dying process.

Here are some of our finished eggs (mostly one of my daughter's):

easter egg dying blog boards

We will thread these like ornaments and hang them on forsythia branches, which aren't quite blooming here yet but will be at my in-laws, where we celebrate Easter.

Oh, and about the total randomness I needed for Picture Inspiration -- I thought our kitchen table looked pretty random after the egg dying.

totally random

I want to say thank you to our friends for coming and helping and making this such an enjoyable day. And I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday, whatever way you celebrate.

6 comments:

April said...

Wow, this looks super fun even though I would be way to lazy to try it! I hope you have a wonderful Easter

arin said...

I'm liking the idea of getting to see more photos in the corresponding blog post :) It must be so hard for you to choose just one, when you've got a treasure trove from the day! The process of this is such a great subject - so ambitious (and with beautiful results!) Enjoy your weekend!

Unknown said...

Oh I love this, D. We also celebrate Easter and Passover...tonight is our Passver dinner with out life-long friends....

this is just beautiful.....

~nut*meg~

Unknown said...

Thank you so much! It's a lot of fun to do this with friends, and kids are like friends when they get old enough :-)

Arin, it took me a while to put all the photos together like this, but it does seem like a good reason to use the blog, and I think it should get easier -- I will just have to do simpler edits on these photos than on what I put on flickr. Hey -- are you in the NYC now or next week?

Megan -- we've been known to put dyed eggs on our seder plate :-)

Landra said...

Lovely. Your photos tell the story.

arin said...

I'm in the city on Sunday evening, until Thursday :) Yay!

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