When the album of Taras Horodetsky’s pysanky was published in 2009, both I and my niece were entranced by his work.  Fuzz fell in love with his patchwork “Crazy Quilt” pysanka (shown above, from page 59), and asked me to make her one like it.  I agreed, as her birthday was coming up, only to discover, on further perusal, that the pysanka in question was written on a goose egg.

I had last worked on goose eggs back in the 1970s, so I had to begin essentially from scratch.  I found some nice goose eggs at a local horse farm via Craigslist, scrubbed them well, and then tried to draw on the designs.  I soon realized that an exact replica would be more trouble than it was worth, and instead created a patchwork design of sorts on the egg, and then filled the “patches” with the same sorts of colors and patterns that Taras had.

Waxing proved tiring, as full goose eggs are quite heavy, but I soon got used to the heft.  (I have since learned to empty goose eggs in advance and work on the empty shells).  I also learned that goose eggs bind very well to dye, and are loathe to let it go.  The green on my first pysanka was difficult to remove with an orange rinse–it took a long time, but turned out all right in the end.  Except that I’d forgotten the blue color!  So I made a second one with all the colors in the original.

The photos have odd reflections on them because they were not taken in my studio, but on my brother's dining room table–thus the ring of lights from the chandelier.

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