elderflower

Brighter Red Brazilwood

| msvarnyk

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!

Kursk with Brazilwood

| msvarnyk

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.

Last two weeks

| msvarnyk

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.

And the season is over for now…

| msvarnyk

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…

Elderflower transformations

| msvarnyk

Same elderflower dye that gave bright yellow 10 days ago, now gives a more “mature” slightly mustardy or greenish color, but still works. I filtered it through a paper towel when it was developing “friends” and keep using it.

Saskatoon berries (Amelanchier alnifolia)

| msvarnyk

Berries are special, tricky but special. I didn’t even know this berry existed before I moved to Regina, but it was very much used by the natives here (it was supposedly one of the ingredients of pemmican). It looks a bit like a large blueberry, though it is supposedly more closely related to apple, it tastes a bit more like black currant maybe, and once you cook it, it smells beautifully of cooked sour cherries. And it dyes. This was made from cooked frozen Saskatoon berries with alum.

Shades of blue are just the Saskatoon berry dye, and other shades are over-dyed with other colors. The dye is rather strong and tends to overpower the colors under it, but if you put it into red or yellow after the blue, shades and even different colours can be achieved. The purple egg is sappan wood over sask berries, the green ones are coreopsis and elderflower over sask. The yellow on the light-blue egg in the bottom is elderflower, then the egg was etched with vinegar back to white, and the light blue is a quick dip (maybe 5 min.) of a white egg into sask berry dye.

The question is, how long will the color last? Berry dyes tend to be not very lightfast, so I’ll need to do some experiments and wait and see what happens.