Today was an interesting practical exploration day. Someone invited me to their back yard and showed me what is actually the “inner bark” of the apple tree. We explored removing it from the trimmed apple tree branches, and now I have some experience. For instance, I know that there is no point trying to remove it (or even the whole bark) from the branches that have been cut a while ago, it is much easier to strip the bark (and separate the inner bark if needed) from the freshly cut branches.
The apple tree dyestuff I have purchased is always whole branches, and they still work, but for some reason all of the late 19th century Ukrainian pysanky-related sources insist that the bark should be stripped from the branches and only the bark should be used for the dye. Korduba even uses a Ukrainian word which I do not know and have not found in the dictionaries, and I am guessing he could be referring to the inner bark:
To obtain the yellow dye, from the wild apple tree peal the bark with sumat’ [inner bark?], soak for some time in room temperature and then hot water and the dye is ready. … Because of that yellow dye is everywhere called as “apple dye”. Besides that, in all villages it is told that earlier and in some places even today the yellow dye is obtained from onion skins by boiling them with water. But that dye looks more reddish and never looks as nice as apple dye. (Korduba 175, my translation)
There are also old Estonian recipes using apple tree bark (and maybe also specifically the inner bark) to make the dyes for fibres, and Estonians had some very interesting ways of processing the barks to achieve strikingly different results, so I have heard (and also have seen some amazing photos or current experiments).
We also went and checked out one of the three claimed “wild apple” trees in Tartu, because it was nearby, and have found out in quite an interesting turn of accidental communications, that the specific tree was entered into the database by mistake, it is not wild. So the “wild” aspect of the apple tree bark used for dye is still inaccessible to us. Let’s see how that aspect unfolds.
Something I have noticed in these first experiments with brazilwood dye is that after the last step of the process, the removal of the wax, the red becomes considerably darker and acquires a more brown sort of a tone. I don’t know a reason for this, I was wondering whether it is affected by the color of the wax (I have been mostly using the blue-coloured wax), so I used mostly white on some of the eggs, or than maybe it was the residue of iron on the egg surface (and so I had an egg without black, hence without iron), or maybe it is just the temperature or exposure to fire when the wax is taken off (I’m removing the wax here in the most common way by melting it off next to the candle flame).
Conclusion so far is the following: I don’t think it’s the wax color, and I also don’t think it’s the iron residue, but I still don’t know what it is. It does so happen that the brighter red I have on the egg didn’t have iron on it, but it was also the last one so far, so I have dyed it to a much lighter shade initially, and it has also changed the tone a bit during wax removal. So we will have to see, maybe we’ll find something out with time.
Yellow – elderflower with alum, red – brazilwood with alum. It’s Kulzhynskyy X-10 (683) village Vyrlook, Radomyshl area, used to be Kyiv governorate, now in Zhytomyr oblast, year 1894. I already did an egg from this village last fall, and will do it again, and also maybe some other eggs from that village, they are cool!
And the last post in today’s posting spree. Three eggs from Kulzhynskyy II-5,8,15 (egg ## 44, 56, 82), Kursk area and governorate, Sloboda Kozatska. These eggs are beautiful and I love them, I have written some before (not these three, it was the first time for these, and I think they might turn out better second time around). These eggs were written in 1891 by a peasant woman Pelageya Aleksandrovna Natarova, who was originally from the village Tazov of Kursk area.
The story of Kursk area eggs is quite unusual, because we generally believe that Russians did not write eggs, however Kulzhynskyy says that the population of all there areas in and around Kursk is predominantly “velikorusskoye“, that is, Russian. He mentions about the eggs acquired in the town of Kursk at the market (so not the ones I have here) that they are written mainly by the old-believer women presumably from the villages and are unknown to the town women. He never says directly that these were written by Russian women, and I don’t know whether old-believers were all necessarily ethnically Russian. What he does say (and that is also quite obvious from the images themselves), that the Kursk area eggs are very detailed, fine, and unlike any other area eggs.
So yea, a bit of a mystery and some potential controversy.
Yellow – elderflower with alum, red – brazilwood with alum, black – logwood with iron.
Here is how brazilwood red (at least this batch) looks like without the yellow underneath, directly on white. This egg was dyed red at the same time with the first brazilwood egg, but it was sitting in the carton waiting for me to decide what exactly I was going to do from Kulzhynskyy with the first color being red (that is rather unusual and drastic, since almost always the first color, the color of the main lines, is white). The black is logwood with iron. Technically it should be possible to get the black from brazilwood with iron (one of the previous eggs was done that way), but by the time I was finishing this one, my iron/brazilwood bath was not cooperating sufficiently well.
I tell you, trying to replicate the 19th century catalogue eggs with natural dyes is a whole different story than just writing eggs as you please and dyeing them with natural dyes. Especially this new/current project of mine, where most of the time (except during the warm-up) I am trying to limit myself to the dye sources that Kulzhynsky mentions in the text of the catalogue. It is a challenge! 🙂 Though I am not complaining.
This is Kulzhynskyy XXVII-16 (egg # 1897), village Bujaki, Bielsk area, Grodno (Hrodna) governorate, currently the village seems to be in Poland close to Belarus border, in year 1895 when this egg was acquired the population was mixed Polish-Belarus.
This is the second of the brazilwood eggs I completed, and I quite like it. The first dye here is yellow (rather than white, which is quite unusual) it’s applewood chips with alum, then red is brazilwood with alum, then black is logwood with iron, and then vinegar etch to white. Kulzhynsky IX-4 (586), rozheva (“of rosette, or rosette-like”), village Chudnovtsi, Lubny area, Poltava governorate, 1894. At that time it would have probably been etched with kvas (fermented sour liquid made of vegetables or grains), I etched this one with household vinegar.
brazilwood red over applewood yellowlogwood blackvinegar etch to whiteafter wax removalimage in the cataloguedescription, egg #586
The first attempt has been described in the previous post here. I needed to try to increase the concentration of the dye, or so I thought.
My first “recipe” was: 50g brazilwood, 500 ml water. Soaked overnight. Simmered for 15 min, added alum.
Second “recipe”: 200g Brazil wood, 1000 ml of distilled water (tried 500, but that was not enough to have the bath liquid), 2/3 of tums tablet. Simmered for about 3 hours, added alum.
dyestuff in water before cookingwhite egg in the dyeyellow egg on the right
It was not working much better than before, the white egg was still just pink, the yellow one was too orange, not red enough. Then I flipped and added a LOT of alum in the dye bath, and the eggs started to get more red.
apple wood alumbrazil wood alumbrazil wood ironwax offtip with some dye lossapple yellow left, elderflower yellow right
That worked better, but was somewhat wiping off at wax removal. you can see it in the photo of the tip. I loved this egg so much, that I did multiple versions. Last photo on the bottom right is a comparison between apple yellow base on the left and elderflower yellow base in the right (I will post the elder flower version photos separately). There is a slight difference in tone, hardly visible in the photo.
I think this is the proof of concept, that intense enough red can be achieved with brazil wood with alum over the yellow base, and black with brazil wood with iron. I’ll post the egg with red without the yellow base separately, once I do something with that egg.
What still needs to be worked out is the details of how to adjust the process, the proportions, etc. to have the dye work well on the egg shell, give a more even tone, maybe work faster, not wipe off with wax, etc. Some of these issues might be the problems with the egg shells themselves (and their prep), rather than the dye, but this is something to test at a later time, when I have access to other kinds of shells that I can process, and when I have space to do this.
The egg is from Kulzhynskyy VIII-11 (545) “Stars” from the village Tarandyntsi, Lubny area, Poltava governorate (1890).
This was supposed to be green, but turned out brown. I probably would need to play with the ph of logwood to take the red shade out, and maybe then it would be more green. Not sure I have the bandwidth for that right now, the classes deadlines are a little wild, so logwood is not a priority.
The egg is based on Kulzhynskyy 5-15, the green “rose” (there’s some debate about which particular flower the Ukrainian word рожа refers to, but in our context it’s not so important), the village Hubske, Lubny area, Poltava governorate, year 1888. Maybe at some point I’ll make it again with proper green, not brown.
Since I now live in EU, I could finally order brazil wood dye chips from Kremer (Germany), I guess they only have a license to sell it within EU, last year when I tried to order it to ship to Canada, they wouldn’t. So now I have it.
Why is it so important? Well, brazil wood is the only natural red dye of the ones mentioned in all of the late 19th century ethnographic sources (about the eggs) that is currently commercially available (though the availability is limited). The other red dye source mentioned is the local Porphyrophora polonica, the so-called “Polish cochineal,” or less misleadingly “Polish carmine scale insect,” or colloquially “St.John’s blood”. In Ukrainian (and similarly in several other Slavic languages) the name of the insect is chervets’ (червець), and it is related to both, the names for the color red (and sometimes the name for beautiful things), and the name of the month of June, when the insects would be harvested for the dye. But more about that on some other occasion. I could not locate a place in the world where this dye source could be purchased, and it is not clear whether it is currently used for dyeing anywhere, rather than being replaced by the Mexican cochineal.
So, the brazilwood. I have used its “older” cousin sappan wood (sometimes referred to as Eastern brazilwood), and maybe I’ll write more about it on some other occasion (in fact I might have written about it a while before), so I went for a very simple recipe more or less analogous to the proportions of chips to water I would have used with sappan wood, though it’s not very easy to properly estimate, since this brazilwood is very finely chopped, almost to the powder, so I would assume it should release more dye than the thicker chips. This is what I ended up using:
50g brazilwood, 500 ml water. Soaked overnight. Simmered for 15 min, added alum.
And this is what I got, left on white egg, right over the yellow (apple wood chips).
This is not the intensity of color I’m looking for, but the tone is right. I think I just have to make the dye bath 3-4 times more concentrated, and potentially explore some other things to add (like hardening the water). So, experiments to be continued.
Both eggs are from Kulzhynkyy’s catalogue, the left one is “the barrel with a man” XIV-15, Nemyriv area, Podillya , the right one is “swallow tails” XII-9, village Blahodatna, used to be Kherson governorate, currently between Mykolayiv and Kherson. I’m torn to whether finish them with these colors or to make a stronger brazilwood dye and dip them again. The right one is pretty much done, just need to remove the wax. The left one was still supposed to have the black background over the red, I might continue as is with brazilwood with iron and see what I get. Maybe this would be a good sample, though not properly colored.
I’m starting this journal of my experience and relationship with my craft of egging – this is how in the egging community we colloquially call our Egg Batik or traditional (sometimes semi-traditional) craft of wax resist on eggs, in Ukrainian tradition it is called pysanky (when referring to the objects – the decorated eggs) or pysankarstvo (when referring to the tradition).
Within the context of the MA in Folkloristics and Applied Heritage studies which I started in September at the university of Tartu, what I am doing here in this journal is called auto-ethnography. But I don’t quite know yet what that means other than the obvious – observing and recording my own experiences in the ethnographic manner with the methods of social anthropology, or something like that.
I have a method I will follow though, and I am bringing it from my previous life as a philosopher, more specifically, as a phenomenologist. The method is called body hermeneutics, and it has been created by my philosophy teacher, Sam Mallin, based on the philosophies (both as theory or conceptual framework and as practice) of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Nietzsche. I am listing them in a counter-chronological way, because it would be probably fair to say that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy has contributed most to the method itself, and Nietzsche’s the least, if one were to assess it by “content”. However, this order of listing them also reveals the lineage, because Merleau-Ponty was studying Heidegger and being influenced by till the last year of his (Merleau-Ponty’s) life, and Heidegger, or course, has been studying Nietzsche, even though at some point around WWII he seems to distance himself from Nietzsche and Nietzsche’s metaphysics.
<This into is becoming too long, am I avoiding the plunge?> Sam used these type of brackets in his own notes to indicate hyper-reflections, especially of this somewhat critical type.
Briefly about the method – I have to say this, because this will not be a solely private text, it will become public. The method in based on the description of a situation that has a hold on us (in this case my situation is the practice of egging, the doing of the craft of egg batik, but it can be any situation, as long as it captures us sufficiently for us to stay in it). The description is done by feeling out and describing our experience through the four “regions” (Merleau-Ponty) of our phenomenological body (perceptual, motor-practical, social-affective, and cognitive). We describe both how the situation (including things and phenomena participating in the situation) is/feels/appears to us (through our bodily regions), as well as how the situation influences and adjusts the functioning/style/attitude of our capacities themselves. This all sounds very theoretical, but to give an example, we describe both how something looks to us, as well as how what we are looking at influences our vision. Still abstract, but it will have to do in the intro, and hopefully some examples will follow eventually. We circle through the descriptions repeatedly, and eventually we get somewhere, we learn something about the situation, though often not immediately, not in the first few sessions. It is a cumulative sort of process.
Sam suggested three major steps to go through each time we do the work.
1) sketch out questions – what are the things we are wondering about as we are starting today’s phenomenological journey. The questions can be of different kinds – from specific questions about this specific “project”, to more general questions, and even more general questions, to specific questions that might seem unrelated to the project, but still are somehow in our side view.
Sometimes it’s not a bad idea to have a bit of a break or change of place between step 1 and step 2.
2) do a round of observation or “silent descriptions” of how the situation works – feel out the situation without writing anything down.
3) write out the descriptions systematically, follow up of the insights that might have presented themselves in step 2, work through all 4 regions if possible. When stuck or even when not stuck, a good strategy is to explore a region that seems least relevant or least engaged in the situation, though if that doesn’t work, then start from anything that works.
If one has a lot of time to do the work, one will keep switching between steps 2 and 3, as one writes something out and then needs to take time to feel out without writing, or sometime to re-attune oneself to the situation. Sometimes one will take breaks, and usually one will not go back to step 1 even after a break, unless one feels that would be useful.
My process of writing eggs is such that I cannot write on the eggs and write notes simultaneously, but I do have periods when the egg is in the dye and I have to wait for it, so maybe that will work just fine.
So enough of avoidance, here I go.
(3:45 pm) Questions
Start with the most difficult and the ultimate for me: What is my relationship with the eggs, and with the egging, with the research of the tradition, and the “experiments” I will need to do? Who am I in this: the researcher, the crafts person, the egger, the dyer, the scientist (???), the anthropologist or the ethnologist, the philosopher/phenomenologist (permanently so?)? Or maybe a Ukrainian, a human, a woman? Or something else? How do these different options and roles change my attitude, or my treatment, my involvement with the eggs/egging? And then the other side of the relationship: what is this egging and these eggs? (I am already refusing to use any of the typical categories – craft, folk art, artefact, even the generic “thing” and opting for an everyday colloquial word that doesn’t even exist in that same way in Ukrainian – what does this tendency or preference of mine mean, how does it affect my relationship, and what affects this tendency in my existing relationship?)
Ukrainian identity, language, history, tradition, current war – how do all these influence my relationship with egging and eggs, and through which bodily regions? Social affective to some degree, cognitive also? How do I feel about this thing being Ukrainian? What are the mixed feelings, what are the seeming contradictions? In what ways do I want to claim the Ukrainianness, and in what ways do I want to avoid it or bracket it?
The motor region – the rhythm and pace, and the manifestation of that through the sound of egging – the stylus on the egg, the dunking in the dye, all that. How do those reflect my initial mood/emotional attitude, how do they change as I work on it (work? Is that what I will be doing and what does that mean, which meanings of “work”)?
The usual anxieties and/or excitements about a new project. What are they, how do they manifest themselves, how are they the reflection of my more general values, needs, desires, passions?
I think that’s more than enough to start. I’m itching to do it, so here I go.
(4:03pm)
I am not including my notes in this post, the notes need to mature, both as they are written, and also some distance needs to be developed between the written note an me, some time needs to pass to let the notes become the notes, solidify in time, something like that. I might even post the whole notes of this first day or parts of them later, but it is too early to do it now. Or so I feel today.
But I will include the photos of the egg, most of which (except the final background color) was completed on that first day.
This is an egg from Vira Man’ko’s The Ukrainian Folk Pysanka, table 4-17, Lviv region. For some unknown reason I often start my season with this egg, it’s a warm-up egg for me. Yellow is coreopsis with alum, red is sappan wood with alum, the black initially was not working, so I etched it back to white and did a few dips into logwood with alum. Technically, it’s dark purple, but looks almost black. There stylus was new, the egg shell did not cooperate very well, so there are several issues visible on the egg, but for a warm-up it’s OK.
First of all I have started my MA in Folkloristics and Applied Heritage Studies at the University of Tartu in Estonia in September, and that has been a demanding but also extremely fulfilling work-out. I love the feel of this place, the city, as well as the program, and the people, and I feel surprizingly comfortable here, even though adjusting to the daily life in a new country is quite energy consuming.
At the end of October – beginning of November I went to DHA42 – Dyes in History and Archaeology conference in Copenhagen and presented there on what we know (and don’t know) about the historic uses of natural dyes on eggs in what is now Ukraine. That whole conference was an amazing experience, from all kinds of angles, and I don’t know whether I will have a chance to write about it, but I do have some notes (and a report I submitted to my program), so who knows, maybe at some point I will find time.
To give a bit more of a visual context for my conference presentation, I made a few eggs, based on the images in late 19th century ethnographic texts, of which there are several, and in my presentation I focused on three of them: one text (sort of an extended article) by Sumtsov, and two egg pattern catalogues (Kulzhynskyy and Korduba) also with significant textual descriptions. I dyed the eggs with the natural dyes mentioned in the texts, or close substitutes where the originally used dyes were not available, and here you see a photo of the egg I made on the background of the page in the contemporary reprint of the old catalogue.
This one was dyed yellow with the apple wood chips with alum, then red in Mexican cochineal with alum (as a replacement of Porphyrophora polonica, an insect dye native to Ukraine and other parts of Europe, which, unfortunately, is not commercially available any more), and then black with sappan wood with iron (again, as a replacement of brazilwood, which was not available for me to buy when I was living in Canada, but now that I am in the EU, I can buy it, and, in fact, it has just arrived from Germany). I also dyed some other eggs red with sappan wood with alum, and some black with logwood with iron.
Now that I have brazilwood, I will try using it for the first time (though not sure when because dyeing is quite a venture in my tiny kitchenette), and see how it works, both with alum and with iron. I am supposing that it should give similar colors as sappan wood, that is, red with alum and black with iron. Technically it might be possible to achieve some other colors or shades with acidity modifiers, but I don’t really need anything I could get from them other than red or black for my current “historical reenactment” purposes. If brazilwood works, I will be one step closer by not having to use the red “replacement” dye, and instead being able to use what is actually listed in the 19th century sources, even though it is (and was) an import dye.
Strangely, madder is not mentioned in any of the Ukrainian historical sources I have seen so far. So unless I can find some evidence of it having been used historically (even if on fibres rather than eggs), locally as a dye (not just in imported fabric dyed somewhere else), I can’t say that it was used, which again reduces my range of potentially local reds.
The only known local source of red then would be Porphyrophora polonica, the status of which is currently unclear. It hasn’t been cultivated (or harvested) in Ukraine for at least a hundred years, possibly longer, and has probably suffered heavily from pesticides, so it appears to be extinct in Ukraine. However, it’s not easy to encounter unless you are looking for it specifically (it lives underground and only comes out once a year), and I’ve heard, it has been spotted somewhere in Poland recently, so there is hope. Of course, from spotting it to feeling free to kill some, is probably a journey of at least a few decades, if everything goes well and they are happily multiplying (and you need to kill a bunch, even though a smaller bunch for egg dyeing than what you would need for fabrics). And then, of course, the technological question of making the dye from the bugs is not exactly an easy one. Something else to explore is potential uses of Porphyrophora polonica in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, maybe Azerbaijan) where it does still occur in nature, but it is not clear whether it is actually used as a dye, rather than being replaced with imported Mexican cochineal.
This particular egg pattern is from Kulzhynskyy’s catalogue (Plate X), it comes from the village Verlok, now in Zhytomyr oblast. The name of the village used to be Vyrlook – sounds like a name of a mythological fantastic creature, about which I knew nothing till I googled. The village used to belong to Kyiv governorate at the end of 19th century, it is about 100km from Bucha, about 80km from Borodyanka, and about 85 km from Mriya on Zhytomyr highway where Russian military killed at least 27 Ukrainians and injured 5 more, most of whom were trying to escape occupation westward between 3 and 25 March 2022. (You can read a report about this, also in English, superbly done by Texty.)
Part of my reason for choosing which eggs to write was in trying to write the eggs from the regions of Ukraine more affected by this war. I also wrote an egg from Kherson region (which I’m not happy with, so I’ll write it again, possibly several times, and then will show it to you). I was looking for the eggs from Chernihiv area, but so far have not identified the ones I wanted to write because all of them in Kulzhynskyy’s catalogue have green, and I am not yet quite happy with the green I have managed to achieve with natural dyes so far. This same reservation applies to a number of eggs from north-east, east, and south of Ukraine.
Another reason I chose this egg was because it is a bit unusual. It is not very common for the flowerpot motif to have this geometric star-flower, rather that some less geometric flowers. It is also not very common for the start-flower to have protruding lines, which make it look less like a flower, and more like a star shaped straw ornament. So for me this egg, while still being quite within tradition, also has its own quirks, its own character, which makes it fun to write.
I am now trying to figure out what exactly I want to do for my MA project, due in roughly a year and a half, in case it remains a project, rather than a thesis. We have two options, writing a “classic” thesis, or making more of a hands-on project accompanied by a paper (much shorter than a thesis would be). I am a bit worried that I will not have enough space to write what I need, in case I opt for a project, however, doing a project would be pushing myself out of my academic comfort zone, and that is probably a good thing. There are some other options I could think of, to sneak in additional text as part of a project, maybe that is what I am going to do, let’s see.
