Last time I posted about pysanky at Xandari was about six months ago, when I showcased some new designs revolving around simple geometric patterns and Costa Rican soccer teams. A few months before that I made a video that displayed the process of making an egg sped up quite a bit. Now, as you can see from the egg photos above with before-and-after wax shots, I’m working with the fresh turkey eggs that we get from Xandari turkeys. They’re a good deal bigger than even some large chicken eggs, although they have a slightly different shape too, as evinced by the picture below.

A fresh Xandari turkey egg, a store-bought chicken egg, and a vinegar-cleansed Xandari turkey egg.

In addition to the new eggs, which allow for more complex patterns given their size, I’m also starting to empty the eggs before working on them, something I had been loath to do in the past because I don’t like to deal with empty eggs floating in the dyes, and a full egg also feels better in the hand because of its heft. The benefit of emptying the eggs first is that the blowing-out process is probably the riskiest step in making pysanky, so ruining a blank egg is better than cracking one that you’ve worked on for hours.

The current work-table. I’ve got new dyes and an egg-blower (the black object left of center) that’s much better than my cheeks.

In the photo above you can also see some fishing line with little wire bits at the end. This is my new, fast, and simple way to make hanging lines for the eggs, and I’ve made tons of them already so I don’t have to worry about it for a while. What I do is twist some thin copper wiring from electrical wire around a tied loop of fishing line, and pinch it closed with pliers. The wire, when pushed together by hand, can fit in the hole at the top of the egg, but then it springs back to a width that doesn’t fit through the hole, so the egg can hang from the fishing line without the loop coming back out.

Another new tool I’ve created for increasing the efficiency of my pysanky-making is this plunger, fashioned from a taper, the tin cup from a tea candle, a paperclip, and a rubber band. I use this contraption to push the hollow eggs down into dyes so they remain submerged without my needing to hold a spoon against them for minutes at a time. The rubber band is where I hang a heavy object from to keep the plunger from rising with the buoyant egg.

The Xandari gift shop pysanky tree.

With these efficiency developments in the pysanky-making process at Xandari, I’ll be able to make more elaborate patterns while spending less time on the little things that distract from the art itself. Since there’s such a big stock of eggs at the moment, however, I’ll probably give the work a little break.