Easter Egg Dye

We take Easter egg dying pretty seriously in our house. We don't just dunk eggs in a color made from a tablet and call it a day; we dunk them in different colors at different levels trying to build up new hues and designs. We also spend a lot of time adding and removing the masking tape, or better yet, stick-on letters, as a resist effect. One year we got a pysanky kit (Ukrainian egg techniques) and dabbled in that, although you can spend hours on one egg, which is not as much fun. This year we learned about a way to swaddle the egg in a piece of patterned silk to transfer the color, which looks really cool, but we were afraid to eat those eggs. Here is a picture of this year’s eggs.

At the end of the egg dying, I couldn't bear to just wash the leftover dyes down the drain. We had mixed up most of the pysanky dyes, and that's pretty high-quality stuff. I started dipping some scrap paper into the dye and that looked pretty good. Then I remembered my giant stash of unsatisfactory prints that I can't bear to throw away. I always feel that I can repaint, overdraw, or reprint on top of anything. After all, plain paper is so boring. So I started dipping and drizzling dyes onto the print scraps. I also floated some of the dyes on top of oil and marbled some of the papers. I had the remains of some old book pages left over from the sketchbook project, that I added into the mix too.  This is what the table looked like at the end of the session:

It took days for the oiled ones to dry, but they took on a translucent quality, that is pretty cool. Now I have a big colorful stash of paper to add into future work.