Easter Eggs

I recently attended a pyansky (Ukrainian egg decorating) workshop taught by local artist Daniela Mahoney, and thought some of her techniques might work well for decorating our Easter eggs.  It turned out to be kind of insane.  Daniela showed us how to take an egg which has been properly blown out (she sells nifty one-hole egg blowing tools) and apply hot beeswax with a special precision tool.  The eggs are then tossed in a special dye which is very intensely colored, and dye the egg in seconds.   I wanted to try to do this with hard-boiled eggs, melted crayons and Paas egg dyes.  Paas dyes are far from ideal but are food grade.  There were too many problems with this to be repeated.  Melted crayons do not stick to hard boiled eggs, so we had to switch to beeswax.  We applied it in a simple, fast way by dripping, but the wax was applied so thickly that it was very difficult to remove, and when we removed it, the dye was partly rubbed off the eggs.  Still, they looked pretty cool.  (I was taught to do the same kind of thing, back when I was  a girl scout, using the fast and effective technique of dripping rubber cement over the eggs.  But rubber cement is not something I think I want on our food!)  We had a lot of fun doing this yesterday evening, and today hid all the eggs for Jasper to find.   

Ms. Mahoney hails from the Czech Republic, and she has personally colored 84,000 eggs!  She sells hand engraved eggs, as well as all the supplies for traditional pyansky decorating, at very reasonable prices. She also gives workshops locally, to adults and kids who are old enough to concentrate for a couple of hours and keep themselves safe with hot wax and candles.  While making precision designs such as hers isn't simple, making very pretty eggs definitely is.