Photos of my snowflake pysanky

I became fascinated with snowflakes when I was a child.  I learned how to cut them out of paper in the third grade, and still make snowflake “vytynanky” to this day.  Years later I learned to crochet them as well, although I haven’t made any that way in years.

I have created lots of snowflake pysanky since the Christmas of 2005, when I first began making them, and have given many of them away.  I managed to photograph most of them, and have posted them on the following pages. 

Like snowflakes, each of my snowflake pysanky is unique.  Even if I try to copy an earlier design, the resulting egg inevitably looks a bit different: the dye may take differently, I might miss or change a small detail, and the placement or proportions might be slightly different.

The first few albums below are “annual collections,” with the new snowflake eggs I made in a given year.  They are a mix of many types, and will also be sorted and added to the appropriate themed albums.  If you’ve looked through these snowflake galleries before, and just want to see newer stuff, this is where you should head.

The other albums have my snowflake eggs sorted by egg type (small, large, brown, goose), and the dye color(s).

Most of my snowflake pysanky are simple two-tone eggs, made from small chicken eggs.  They have white snowflakes and varying background colors. I’ve sorted them out here by these colors:

The “Denim” pysanky have a rubbed looking finish.  This “mottled” effect is obtained by washing and/or rubbing off darker colors (royal blue, purple, red), and then dipping the egg into light blue, or very briefly into purple or royal blue.  (I usually do this on those eggs where the finally color took unevenly, or had unsightly scratches, rings  or blotches*.)

I have also experimented a bit, and made some snowflake pysanky with larger eggs and more colors. A larger egg allows for a much more intricate snowflake....usually.  They can be found here:

I decided to try my hand at a different pysanka technique–drop-pull–and try applying it to snowflakes.  While it seems this would be a natural combination, my skills at drop-pull are still evolving.  Still, the snowflakes looked nice enough, and I will work more on this in the future.

In 2011 I tried an entirely new (for me) technique: acid etching. After trying it out on brown eggs, and making some interesting autumnal eggs, I turned to white eggs, and used a technique that Taras Horodetsky had pioneered: etching and then dyeing the background a contrasting color.  I made several such pysanky, and gave them away.  But I photographed them first, and you can see them here: