Crafts Night: Pysanky Easter Eggs

Every other month I get together with some friends from my local Newcomers Club for a night of crafting.  Sometimes we just bring whatever current project we are working on, other times we all work on the same project.  Over the past two years we have tried scrapbooking, card making, home decor, jewelry making, and knitting. This week we decided to try our hand at Pysanky (Ukranian) Easter Eggs.  One of our group members has been making these every year for the past 5 years or so, so she had all the necessary supplies, and was able to instruct the rest of us.  

These are the ones my friend has made over the years.

Basically, you create a design on your egg using beeswax and a stylus, then put the egg in a light colored dye bath.  

K. is quite the artist!
She spent a long time putting very intricate designs on her egg.

The parts of the egg covered in wax will remain white.  After coming out of the dye, you add more wax designs, then put it in another color dye. You can repeat this process as much as you want, progressing from light to dark colors. 

Once you are finished, put the egg in a 200 degree oven for a few minutes to soften the wax, and wipe it off.

You end up with a beautiful multi-colored egg!  Here are the finished products:

Mine's the bright red one in the back.
I "egg-lifted" one of my friend's designs!

It was actually a lot easier that I thought it would be, but does require quite a bit of special equipment.  I would love to try it again though, now that I have a better sense of what I am doing!

Creative Chaos

Wow! It's been over a month since I've posted or done anything scrappy related!

Yesterday I took a class at my local scrapbook store, The Papercraft Clubhouse, called "Creative Chaos." The store's owner Tracie recently took a class by the same name with Tim Holtz and Jennifer McGuire, and she passed along all that she learned to the twelve of us.

In all we created eight tags, four designed by Tim and four by Jennifer. 

Here are the "Tim" tags that I made. The first one features lots of Distress ink and Rock Candy Crackle Paint.

More Distress Ink on this next one, plus a generous coating of Distress Stickles.

The third tag features alcohol ink on glossy paper, plus more on a Grungeboard die cut...I went a bit overboard on the copper mixative!

For this last one, we ran the tag through Distress Ink spritzed with water on our craft mats.

And here are the Jennifer designed tags. I love the simplicity of this first one! The dots are heat embossed on the tag with clear embossing powder.

This next one was a bit of a goof.  After inking the diecut shape, we were supposed to stamp with Versamark ink and heat emboss with white powder.  I accidentally used clear! I tried to salvage it by going over the image with a Versamark pen and re-embossing with white powder, but the image lost a lot of the detail in the process. Oh well!

The stamped image on the next one is hard to see...we inked up a floral stamp with Versamark, spritzed with a Perfect Pearls spray, and then stamped onto blue cardstock. The flowers are inked with Wild Honey and Spiced Marmalade Distress Ink.

This last one uses a generous amount of Barn Door Distress Ink and Gold Perfect Pearls spray!

All in all, a great class.  Can't wait for Part 2!