UKRAINIAN PYSANKA PAGE TWO

It's all about making beautiful eggs with ugly beeswax, ordinary candles, odd little kistki or styluses, and dyes. The way you do it is like this: first you dye the entire egg a light color, like yellow. Next you draw a design that you want to be yellow with melted wax, using a kistka. Then you dye the whole egg in a slightly darker dye, say, orange. Next you draw the design you want to be orange with melted wax and dip the egg in a slightly darker dye, say, red. You continue like this until your entire design is completed. By this time the eggs looks awful: it is all black with smoky wax! Rebecca and Katie Bowen (left to right) show us their eggs before they took all the wax off.

You remove the wax by holding it to a candle so that there is enough heat to melt the wax but not cook the egg. This mysterious hand shows us the final result when all the wax is removed. (Here is a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing.) By the way you get far less cholestorol in your arteries decorating the incredible edible egg than you do eating it.

The payoff is the eggcitement (I had to do one egg joke) of taking home a beautifully crafted egg. Here Walter 'Faberge' Webster and Natasha (Rembrandtsky) Yelanskaya (one of the several real Russians and Ukrainians at the egg fest) show off their handiwork. The eggs are still raw but in a 3-4 months the shells will be empty except for a few harmless crystals of cholesterol. (Of course, you shouldn't check to see if this is true.)

Unfortunately, the whole thing was a great big mess! Just look at that table! Upperclass Russian majors (as usual) led the way. So why are they smiling? Do they think Professor Beard is going to clean all of this up? He is so distraught that he can't decide what to do with his egg. Throw it? Nah! They wouldn't understand.