I don’t know how people get bright red from madder, this is all I can get, and that on a brown egg.
brown chicken
Last two weeks
Made some more eggs, some were attempts to copy Lithuanian drop-pull eggs, while others were inspired by Lithuanian patterns. A number of dyes – two of coreopsis (extract and fresh), elderflower (dried), sappan wood, madder, saskatoon berries (frozen), I think that’s it though I might have forgotten something. Mainly with alum, one egg had sappan wood with iron on background.
Traditional Lemko patterns
This year, I tried to replicate some of the traditional Lemko patterns from Elyjiv’s book with natural dyes. Of course, Elyjiv’s eggs were not made with natural dyes, neither, most likely, those Elyjiv copied from, but I thought this experiment would be interesting. Sometimes the dyes do not cooperate, and that goes for natural dyes even more than for aniline ones. Sometimes I used brown eggs, and that, of course, changed the colors as well. But, anyway, this was fun. 
And the season is over for now…
All of these colors were achieved with the combinations of saskatoon berries (blue), sappan wood (red, pink), buckthorn (yellow), buckthorn with iron (brown), gardenia (yellow/gold), coreopsis (gold), elderflower (yellow) (except emu where no dyes were used), plus the natural variations of eggshell color and vinegar for etching.
I’m becoming more comfortable with drop-pull technique, seeing more possibilities. While most of these eggs are trying to be strictly traditional as much as possible (mostly Ukrainian, some Lithuanian), a few patterns have just appeared out of nowhere, non-traditional (though not necessarily anti-traditional) which is nice. To write “my own” design is something that almost never happened to me in the other more common technique, so to have it happen in drop-pull after a relatively short time is rather surprising and even inspiring. 🙂
I’m getting ready to put away the dyes and tools for now, but there might be some more posts of close-up shots, and who knows when the next time will be…
More of sappan wood
Made this egg few weeks ago, when sappan wood dye was still fresh. Brown chicken egg, etched with vinegar, then sappan wood. Inspired by Natalie Kit and her brown eggs that I saw at Pysanky Toronto.
The pattern is from Odarka Onyshchuk’s album, I already the same pattern in malva and buckthorn and posted earlier. Here’s the photo of both eggs with this pattern together, who knows, I might make more of these still, love that pattern this year.