I’ve long been impressed by the work of Iryna Vakh, who seems to effortlessly create so many beautiful and varied “avtorski” pysanky.  I really love the “winter scene” eggs she creates, as on this page from her book:

Using just a few shapes and lines, she recreates Ukrainian villages in the snow. This year I decided to use her techniques and motifs to try and create similar winter-themed goose eggs.

I have used her eggs for inspiration before; one of her sunflowers inspired my sunflower goose eggs, and I used her winter deer (above, top left) as the basis of mine. So I took bands from one, houses from a second, and trees from a third and recombined them on a goose egg to get the two pysanky below.

I really love the way Iryna created snow covered spruces with just white lines and dots:

And I love how she creates houses in the snow with a few simple lines:

I only used two dyes to fully dye the eggs: UGS Light Blue and Royal Blue.  The first egg, shown above, took the dyes much like a chicken egg (reasonably well).  The second egg (shown in the photos below) took the dye exceedingly well–the initial light blue was so dark that I had to wash the dye off a bit to get a true light blue color.  And the Royal Blue took quite darkly, as is evident by the background color.  Thus the first egg has two shades of blue, and the second has three.

I did spot dye the church with a bit of pink dye, giving it a slightly purplish cast, on each of the eggs.

  Winter Deer Goose Egg Pysanky