Now that you’ve made a bunch of pysanky, what do you do with them?  Well, you can give them away, but you’ll probably want to keep some for yourself as well. You’ll want to display some of them, but not necessarily all of them, and not necessarily at once.

You don’t need any fancy expensive containers to store away your collection of pysanky.  The simpler, actually, the better.  Many of the collectors I know in Ukraine store them in flats in large egg boxes.  These are some of Vira Manko’s huge collection of pysanky: the cardboard egg trays/flats are stacked in a cardboard box for safe-keeping:

She manages to store several thousand pysanky in a very small space this way.

Similar boxes of eggs are available in the US, but only for bulk commercial buyers (e.g. restaurants).  Costco now sells its cage free eggs in packages of two flats with a plastic cover; these eggs are of decent quality, and usually take dye well.  I save the flats, and find they fit perfectly in a 12” x 12” x 12” box (which I bought in bulk from Staples).  One such box can store five flats, or 150 eggs.

What is the best way to store your pysanky?

It is important to keep the eggs out of direct light.  Aniline dyes are not light stable, so direct light (particularly sunlight) light can fade the colors if you’re not careful  Thus you need to put the pysanky away in some sort of closed boxes where light won’t reach them.

The type of boxes you need depends almost entirely on what kind of pysanky you have.  If you empty your eggs, and save only decorated shells, you have many more good options.  If you leave the yolk and white in your pysanky, your choices will be much more limited (but your magical powers will be infinitely greater....).

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