Social Networks
Social networks have become quite popular the last few years, and many pysankary have gotten involved with them, to varying degrees of success.
There didn’t seem to be any pysanka blogs out there, so I created one several years ago...........and then promptly ignored it, after a few (eight) sparse posts. Blogger is clunky and not fun to use. My iWeb blogger, on the other hand, was a joy to use......but was only supported by .mac, which has bitten the dust. Oh, well. Old technologies die new ones take their place.
In the past few years, a few (and, quite frankly, very few) other pysanka blogs have popped up:
There used to be more, but they are dwindling away. I strongly suspect that the future of pysankarstvo does not lay in blogging.
Yahoo Groups were an early form of social networking, bringing people with common interests together and linking them by e-mail. I belong to the Eggs-Pysanky Yahoo group, and have found them to be a friendly and helpful bunch. A lot of the hints and variations on techniques I’ve added to my site have come from them. I have learned a lot from these people, and am quite grateful.
The Eggs-Pysanky home site had a valuable archive of old posts, which was worth perusing, and many interesting files and links (all of which were only available to members).
But Yahoo has dissolved groups, and all the old archives are gone.
Facebook
Facebook, the new king of social networking, has a group for just about any taste–and, if it doesn’t, you can form one. If you search for “Pysanky,” you’ll get a lot of hits, from personal pages to various groups. I’ve joined several groups, including:
Traditional Ukrainian Folk Pysanky is a small group I formed to help popularize our traditional folk designs. It is an open group: any FB member can look at the photos or download the files. I started this group to make it easier to share photos and larger files.
Incredible Eggs–Pysanky and Batik is supposed to be about the art of writing pysanky, but veers often into chit chat and other techniques. It does provide good technical information, and is a good place to get questions answered. It’s a friendly group, but a closed one––you have to join to see or post.
The World of Pysanka Makers was formed by a friend of mine, Tym. People share tips and pysanka photos there. An open group, but has been archived.
Pysanka Gallery is a group I formed simply to share photos of pysanky, both modern and traditional. An open group.
Ukrainian Eggcessories Eggers is a group formed by Kathy Schoenfelder-Verelli, the new owner of Ukrainian Eggcessories, which is based in Canada and sells a line of pysachky, traditional and electric, and dyes, waxes etc. As she describes “This Facebook group was created to give Ukrainian Eggcessories' customers and all those who love to write traditional pysanky or modern batik pysanky a place to share their creations and excitement of writing pysanky.”
There are other interesting groups, including largely Ukrainian or Spanish-language groups. A few formerly active groups have either become taken over by spammers (Ray Ban glasses anyone?) or monopolized by single individuals pushing their line of products (i.e. spammers). I’ve left them. As always, you just have to look around and find the group that suits you.
Keep in mind that to access any of these groups you need to be a Facebook member–an exclusive club with only about 2.13 BILLION active monthly users at the moment.
This is the new kid on the block, and gaining in popularity. Pinterest lets you find interesting pictures on line and “pin” them onto your own page. I find it useful for keeping track of photos found on the web, as I don’t lose the source and context as I often usually do when I download them.
Check out my boards of traditional Eastern European decorated eggs. Or have a look at some other interesting boards:
So Jeo: Pysanky and Batik Easter Eggs (all her work)
Maggie Tarris Bauer’s Boards (pysankarstvo)
Or better yet, use the search engine on the Pinterest page and explore!
Nothing to speak of, yet. A few sellers of pysanky and other Ukrainian “souvenirs” have started Twitter feeds, but nothing of interest. The Twitter format (messages of even 280 characters) does not lend itself to discussions about pysanky and pysankarstvo. It is better suited to breaking news, silly gifs and witty repartee.
....is an incredibly useful and FREE cloud storage service. You get 20 GB free for each Gmail account you have. And you purchase an upgrade to 100GB quite cheaply.
Google limits the types of formats it supports, but does a wonderful job of letting you upload materials and share then with either specific individual or with groups. I find it invaluable for sharing photos with family as well as pdfs with fellow pysanka enthusiasts.
And then there’s Tumblr. (What is it with social media and its hatred of vowels?) It seems to be a cross between blogging and pinning. There’s more text than you usually see on Pinterest, but not that much more. And there are hashtags, just like Twitter.
And lots of pictures. Search for “pysanka” or “pysanky” and you can find lots of pictures of pretty eggs; some of them may actually turn out to be pysanky.
What, another one? Seriously? As if there aren’t enough types of social media. Apparently this one is just for pictures, and just for smart phones or similar devices. It is a photo sharing app that lets you manipulate the photos with various filters, and chose an audience for your photos. Are there photos of pysanky there? I assume. Have I seen them.........let me fire up the iPad and see if I can remember my sign in.
Back to MAIN Pysanka home page.
Back to Main Links home page.
Back to Pysanka Index.
