There. It's been a crafty couple of weeks. First, congratulations are due to certain friends who made a daughter this week. Certainly it is more of an accomplishment than anything I had a hand in creating this week, but that's for them to brag and post pictures about on their own.
Girlfriend and I collaborated on a stuffed owl to bestow upon the child, and got it to the parents just ahead of the baby's arrival. Here's a picture of it (the owl, not the baby) and of the person who did all of the work:
I love how surprised it looks in this picture.
But today being the day before Easter, it was time to dye eggs. I don't remember when exactly we decided to make this a "thing," but now it's a "thing" and we do it, rather experimentally sometimes.
Ready for serious art.
Last year, and I think the year before as well, we used food coloring for dye and were able to use the droppers and concentrated dyes to make some Jackson-Pollack-esque patterns. This year we used the dissolving pellets instead, so we couldn't do that, but we did some things I think are neat anyway.
Two things here. First, on the left, yes, I'm continuing my theme of incongruous jack-o'-lanterns*. You don't have to think that's the cleverest thing ever. As for the one on the right, I'm pleased with it largely because it represents a way to use eggs that get botched. I spent a good long time getting an egg an even shade of red, and then managed to break it. I might have thrown it out, but now my otherwise relatively unadorned "eye egg" is wearing it! In this picture the shell is just wrapped around the egg, but I went back and stuck it on with egg white so that it will survive transport.
Nothing too original** here. I am kind of pleased with my bucolic egg on the left. On the right, another egg salvaged using the remains of a less lucky one.
If this were local news I'd say something about "sunny side up" here and my co-host would laugh.
This was the first egg where we discovered something that's maybe obvious to everyone else, but Girlfriend and I discovered at age 27. You know those clear crayons that come with the dye? Well obviously you can use them to keep part of an egg white--I knew that already--but you can also use it on top of one layer of dye to preserve it through a second layer of dye. This is a trick we'll tuck away for the future, like the shell-wrapping thing. If we keep doing this this way every year, we are going to end up a couple of old people who are awesome at Easter eggs. That is not something I saw for myself, but I'll take it.
Okay. Because we're crazy, were going to drive to Philadelphia now. Bye.
* I went back to look up my "pineappolantern" post, to make sure I spelled "jack-o'-lantern" consistently. I thought it might be easier to just search for "pineappolantern" on Google than to go through the blog archives. You know what's humbling? Finding out you don't come up on the first page of search results for a word you invented.
** First, I wrote "origingal." In a better world, that would mean something.
It occurred to me that I should dye eggs today but that's as far as I got. I miss living at Hedgehog at times like this because I enjoy tradition but am usually too lazy to make it happen on my own.
ReplyDeleteRe pineappolantern: that's just because Google doesn't recognize the awesomeness of your word and spell-corrected it. If you put it in quotes—"pineappolantern"—then you come up first.
Re preserving layers of dye, that's totally how Ukrainian easter eggs work, only for those you melt wax over a flame in a metal tool called a kistka, and then use that to draw on the egg. You guys should try it next year; it's simple enough. (Well, it's hard to actually draw straight and not deposit the wax in globs.)